Seven C Music in St. Petersburg
Stepping into Seven C Music and Coffee is like feeling a warm embrace, with the smell of the house-roasted coffee permeating the air and the cozy aesthetic of tables and couches on colorful rugs, amid the wooden bar, bookshelves and intimate stage.
And everywhere you look, there are guitars. The ones for sale hang on walls and from a rack on the ceiling. Some of the ones that have just been repaired hang on the sales floor, waiting to be picked up; others are in the back, being worked on by the shop’s five repair people.
Opened by father and son David and Joel Hosler, Seven C is a rarity that’s established itself as a community hub in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District. It’s a true mom and pop shop, with Joel’s wife Tiffany running the coffee operation.
David Hosler was a lifelong musician who played lead guitar for touring bands, but he is also an experienced luthier who spent 40 years designing, building and repairing guitars. A Sarasota native, he eventually moved to South Carolina, where he opened the Guitar Workshop before a 20-year career working for the prestigious Taylor Guitars in Southern California. During his time with Taylor Guitars, David designed and created the company’s first proprietary pickup system, according to Seven C’s website.
After retiring from Taylor in 2015, David returned to Tampa Bay and moved to St. Petersburg. He thought he would spend most of his time fishing, but he said when word got out about his retirement, he was called back into the business by helping one person after another.
“And then a year later I’m not fishing anymore,” David said.
Seeing the opportunity for business here, David called Joel, who had taken after his father in building and repairing guitars and had also worked for Taylor Guitars. (He also had a band, Noise Ratchet, with which he worked with legendary producer Rick Rubin). He moved from California and the first Seven C Music opened on Haines Road in St. Petersburg.
The first few years in business were plagued by road construction, so another space was needed. Enter the warehouse space on the ArtsXChange campus, where WADA leaders encouraged them to move in because they wanted music to be part of the district’s experience, David said.
I said ‘you know, that’s what I’m looking for,’” David said. “If I’m going to be doing this, I want to be part of a community.”
The Hoslers applied the knowledge they learned about the industry from Taylor Guitars, David said. The repair people they hired are some of the best he’s ever met. The repair benches are visible to the public because David knows that people love to watch the process.
He also knows that the industry needs young people to carry on the craft. A few of the repair staff are young and in the case of one young woman, never had any prior experience. The shop offers training programs because, “you don’t really learn this off YouTube,” David said.
While the shop gets repair jobs from throughout the Southeast and Miami because of its reputation, an uptick in business happened after Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
Despite David’s philosophy on repair (“get it in, do the work, get it out”), it took almost the whole two years since the storms to get all of the jobs done.
When one of the customer’s repair jobs was going to cost almost as much as the guitar was worth, the customer offered to just give them the guitar to be fixed, sold and whatever extra money was left after the repair was paid would be passed on to the next customer.
The pay-it-forward formula worked.
And that wasn’t the only way the shop served the post-hurricane community. The storms’ devastation of the beaches displaced dozens of musicians from their gigs.
Thinking of the shop’s stage, the Hoslers invited displaced musicians to play on Saturday mornings at 10-noon. They would keep 100% of their tips. David said the first musician made $900 in tips/
“Now who would have thought that every Saturday morning, anywhere from 40 to 80 people would come here every Saturday morning, have coffee, and listen to somebody play? And we started calling it Saturday morning church,” David said.
While Saturday mornings are reserved for “friends and family” musicians, like Joel, who played in October, the Hoslers use their industry connections to book nationally-known musicians there. Singer-songwriter and 90s icon Lisa Loeb played there in September.
“It’s a good thing this happened to me,” David said. “The only people I would have known would be out on the pier or the bait shop, right? I love the friends we’ve made here.
“We have to create commerce, community, and confidence.” •
To learn more, visit sevencmusic.com.
