We are buying less and less wine. We are also buying fewer and fewer pianos. You can see where I’m going with this, because YES, the story of the acoustic piano offers a troubling mirror to that of wine. Here too, a once-structuring market has collapsed, driven in part by a cultural falling-out of favor. In recent years, the crisis in Chinese luxury real estate—on which sales of high-end pianos were structurally dependent—has accelerated the decline. And yet this piano market continues to exist. Better still: in its uppermost segment, it thrives. Steinway & Sons, the New York manufacturer founded in 1853 by a German immigrant who became Henry E. Steinway, is the most brilliant proof of this.
For a hundred and sixty-five years, Steinway followed a formula of remarkable constancy: build the finest instruments in the world for the greatest performers, so that their prestige might irrigate the desires of private buyers. This is a model of cultural trickle-down, precisely the one wine practiced with its great classified growths: a pyramid of prices, borne aloft by a handful of legendary labels, drew the entire category upward with it.
This model no longer works, neither for the piano nor for wine, because the foundation on which it rested—the practice itself—is crumbling. Fewer people learn the piano; less wine is drunk day to day. In recent years, Steinway’s genius has been to understand that the solution did not lie in persuading more people to play the piano, but in making the piano a desirable object independent of its original function—an object of collection, of status, of aesthetic contemplation and cultural experience. The brand deliberately widened its target from pianists to lovers of beautiful things: wealthy collectors, connoisseurs of European craftsmanship, investors in search of tangible and rare assets. The piano is no longer sold as a musical instrument; it is sold as a living fragment of heritage.
This is where the strategy becomes truly disruptive. With Spirio, Steinway developed a technology that allows a traditional acoustic piano to play itself, reproducing with extreme fidelity the touch and interpretation of the greatest pianists in history—from Rachmaninoff, one of the brand’s legendary “Immortals,” to Lang Lang or Yuja Wang today. The customer no longer needs to know how to play in order to possess, in their own home, the equivalent of a private concert given by the world’s greatest soloists. The piano becomes a cultural medium, almost a service of exclusive curation, while remaining an object of flawless craftsmanship.
The analogy with great wines then becomes obvious. Wine, too, holds its own potential for a “Spirio”: the augmented experience, the historical verticality, certified rarity, the digital traceability of bottles, access to immersive tastings or to vintages otherwise unreachable… Selling access, a story, a total sensory experience, in a sense—exactly what Steinway did in transforming an instrument into a gateway to the entire world of piano repertoire.
Another decisive lesson: Steinway turned the secondary market into a strategic pillar rather than a threat. Its certified pre-owned piano program—with rigorous inspection, original parts, and a five-year warranty—pursues a dual goal: retaining control over resale, and ensuring that the instrument’s value holds steady, or even appreciates, over twenty or thirty years.
Thinking differently, and choosing the right strategy in a period of industry decline—this is what I take from this lesson in strategy from Steinway. They did not throw up their hands in the face of technological disruption; they did not throw up their hands in the face of competition by cutting prices. They told themselves they could find a new path by leaning on a brand they had built decade after decade in the world of luxury. This is what we do every day at VitaBella, building brands and working alongside them to evolve their image and their offering—sometimes, as in the world of wine, amid crisis and considerable turbulence. And it must be said that our clients are outperforming the market today. Tomorrow, they will emerge from this crisis even stronger, but with a vision, an offering, a clientele, and a scope of activity quite different from what they had ten years ago…
Contact Guillaume Jourdan via LinkedIn
*To learn more about Steinway & Sons, I recommend reading this article.
