Every other brand here is a family name with a founding date. Boston is a product line with a designer.

Boston is the odd one out in this round, and that is why it is here. It has no founder, no workshop and no family. It is the second line of Steinway & Sons, and Steinway’s own annual report for 2006 dates it simply: “We introduced the Boston line in the early 1990s.” (The year 1991 is widely given by dealers; we have not seen it in a filing.)

Its identity is a single sentence, printed on the brand’s pages: “Boston | Essex — Designed by Steinway & Sons.” Steinway’s own page expands it: Boston pianos are “Designed by Steinway & Sons, employing the unique patents and expertise” of the house. Every other brand in this round asks you to trust a family name; Boston asks you to trust a designer’s.

The owner behind that designer has changed once in the brand’s life. In Steinway’s words: “We were acquired by John Paulson and certain affiliated entities in 2013.” In 2022 Steinway filed to list its shares. The filing describes its parent, Paulson Pianissimo LLC, as owning 100 percent of its stock before the offering — and the offering never happened. Steinway withdrew the registration on 9 May 2023. Steinway is not a listed company, and we do not describe it as one.

Steinway’s own filings say where Boston pianos are made. They do not say who makes them.

The 2022 registration statement is the most precise document about Boston that exists in public. It says Boston and Essex pianos are “designed and engineered using the Steinway experience, expertise, specifications, and patents… built in Asia to maximize manufacturing efficiencies, but benefit from Steinway & Sons’ quality control and oversight.” And then, exactly: “Our Boston pianos are produced in Hamamatsu, Japan and near Jakarta, Indonesia by third-party manufacturers, while our Essex pianos are manufactured in Guangzhou, China by a third-party manufacturer.”

Cities, not companies. In the filings we read — that statement and Steinway’s annual reports for 2006, 2007 and 2013 — the name Kawai appears only in the list of competitors. Kawai’s own corporate history, from 1927 to 2018, does not mention Boston or Steinway at all; we searched it for both. Yet American Steinway dealers say openly, on their own sites, that Boston pianos are built by Kawai, and a 2016 industry report said the same. It is consistent with the cities in the filing: Kawai is a Hamamatsu company, and it runs piano plants at Karawang, east of Jakarta.

So the honest statement is narrow: Boston pianos are built by Kawai, according to Steinway dealers and the trade press; Steinway’s filings name only the cities. We do not go further, because neither company does. The Essex line, built in Guangzhou, is attributed by the same 2016 report to Pearl River — the state-owned group that also owns Schimmel.

There is a symmetry here with the German houses in this round. Grotrian’s Wilhelm line names its Chinese maker, its own parent; Bechstein’s Zimmermann page names neither country nor maker. Boston names the country and the city with legal precision — and leaves the maker’s name to the dealers.

Three in four Steinway-group pianos sold in 2012 were Boston or Essex. They earned about a fifth of the revenue.

The figure that explains Boston comes from Steinway’s annual report for 2012, filed in 2013. Boston and Essex together, it said, accounted for “74% of total piano units sold but only 21% of total piano division revenues in 2012.” The same report said each line was “sole sourced from manufacturers in Asia.” Six years earlier, the 2006 report had given the same ratio in rougher form: “almost 60%” of units, “less than 20%” of revenue.

Read that as a brand strategist would. Most of the pianos the Steinway company sold in 2012 were not Steinways. They were Bostons or Essexes, designed in the Steinway tradition and built in Asia. The famous name earned the revenue; the second and third names did most of the selling. And Steinway, by its own account, keeps the arrangement inside its own network: “With certain limited exceptions, we allow only Steinway dealers to carry” the two lines. The filing places Boston in “the upper-middle market segment.”

That is also why the designer credit matters so much: it carries the weight a maker’s name would otherwise carry. A federal appeals court recognised that weight in 1975, in a case about Grotrian, when it held that a name suggesting a connection with Steinway could draw a buyer’s initial interest, and that such confusion injured Steinway. Boston is the authorised version of that connection.

Steinway’s own page notes that the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes recorded Chopin on a Boston grand, the GP-215. The models are labelled plainly — GP for grands, UP for uprights — like catalogue entries rather than heirlooms.

The contrast with Kawai’s own catalogue is telling. Kawai sells its finest instruments under a family name, Shigeru Kawai, built at its Ryuyo grand-piano factory — fewer than 20 SK-EX concert grands a year, it says. Whoever builds Boston, the company most often named for the job reserves its own family’s name, on the evidence of its own catalogue, for its own best work.

The most important words on a Boston are not “Boston.”

Most brands put their own name first. Boston’s real identity sits in its credit line — “Designed by Steinway & Sons” — and the model codes, GP and UP, are deliberately plain beside it. It is a brand built like a film credit: the director’s name sells the picture; the studio that shot it is in the small print, or in this case not printed at all.

That makes Boston the cleanest illustration of this round’s argument. Every heritage house here has had to decide how much of its factory to put on its nameplate. Boston was designed from the start without one. A buyer who wants to know where it was made can find the answer in a securities filing. A buyer who wants to know who made it has to ask a dealer.

For this guide we use a Boston copper and a pale maple with a clean catalogue sans. These are an unofficial interpretation, not the colour values of Boston or Steinway, and nothing of either mark is reproduced.

Keep Boston’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.