Perzina began with two brothers and a sign.

Perzina’s own history opens with a date and an image: “The history of the Perzina Piano begins on July 1, 1871.” That day, it says, the brothers Julius and Albert Perzina “painted ‘Gebrüder Perzina’ … on the dilapidated gable of an old piano factory in Schwerin,” the capital of Mecklenburg in northern Germany. Both, it says, had worked at Bechstein, in Berlin, before setting up on their own. The company grew from 20 pianos in its first year to 1,000 in 1910, it says; the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin named it a court supplier in 1884, and in 1906 Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands granted it the title “Royal Piano factory.” Its letterhead claimed “The Largest Piano Factory in Northern Germany.” Julius Perzina’s son-in-law, Daniel Huss, ran the business from 1897 to 1917, and grand pianos joined the range in 1905. These are the company’s accounts.

Piano Buyer gives the decline briefly: Perzina was “a prominent piano maker until World War I, after which its fortunes declined… the factory was moved to the nearby city of Lenzen and the company became known as Pianofabrik Lenzen GmbH.” Lenzen lay in what became East Germany, and the company’s own history notes that after 1990 the state privatisation agency, the Treuhand, “looked to the west for new investors for its Perzina asset.”

So by the time of reunification, the name had a long history and a modest factory behind it — the kind of asset that a buyer from outside the old German industry could see value in. We could not establish what became of the Lenzen factory itself after the sale, and do not say.

A Dutch entrepreneur and a factory in Yantai.

The buyer came from the Netherlands, where the Perzina name had royal associations. Piano Buyer says that “In the early 1990s the company was purchased by Music Brokers International B.V. of the Netherlands,” and that manufacturing was then moved to Yantai, in China’s Shandong province, “where, under license, Perzina verticals and grands were made for a number of years by another company.” Piano Buyer does not name the licensee, and we do not guess. The brand thus spent its first years in China as a licensed name on someone else’s pianos before it had a factory of its own. In 2003, it says, Music Brokers “established Yantai-Perzina, a joint-venture factory in Yantai, where it now builds Perzina pianos.”

The man behind it was Ron Bol. A 2015 Piano Buyer article described Perzina as “revived as a privately owned company by Dutch piano entrepreneur Ron Bol, who eventually partnered with Chinese entrepreneur Sun Qiang.” Music Brokers, founded by Bol in 1980, also represents a second revived German name, Gerh. Steinberg of Berlin — a different firm from the Thuringian Wilh. Steinberg in this series. Piano Buyer says Music Brokers bought G. Steinberg, a Berlin firm of 1908, in 1993. Bol’s business, in other words, has taken up at least two old German names, not one. A US dealer places Music Brokers’ headquarters in Veenendaal, in the Netherlands.

Piano Buyer lists the maker plainly: “Yantai Perzina Piano Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Yantai, Shandong Province, China.” Its brand profile describes design features the company emphasises — a “‘floating’ soundboard” and a “reverse or concave soundboard crown” — and a grand line introduced in 2011, “designed and manufactured by Perzina in cooperation with a major European manufacturer,” which it does not name.

A name that passed with the business.

Perzina’s revival sits on a simple legal fact: a trade mark lives by use. In the United States a mark is “abandoned” when “its use has been discontinued with intent not to resume such use,” and “Nonuse for 3 consecutive years shall be prima facie evidence of abandonment.” European and British law set a five-year clock for “genuine use,” and the EU regulation spares a mark whose “genuine use… has been started or resumed” before anyone applies to revoke it. Perzina’s name, unlike some, did not need to be rescued from silence: it passed with the business, through Lenzen and the Treuhand, to a new owner.

The trade has a cheaper practice that the law polices. In a 2019 decision on the Schiedmayer name, the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board described sellers who buy “unbranded, ‘no-name’ pianos from China” and put unrelated makers’ marks on them — “known in the industry as ‘stencil pianos’” — and cancelled one such registration because it would “falsely suggest a connection” with the real maker. Perzina’s owners built a factory instead: a joint venture in Yantai dedicated to their brand, with design features they describe and Piano Buyer reviews.

British law adds a rule that matters to every revived name: a mark can be revoked if its use makes it “liable to mislead the public, particularly as to the nature, quality or geographical origin” of the goods. Piano Buyer’s 2022 survey listed Perzina among the “foreign-owned companies that own factories in China” making pianos for the American market — a description the brand’s own history, which ends in Yantai, does not dispute.

A slogan that puts the old first.

Perzina’s tagline is “Innovation through tradition!” and its site carries “ESTABLISHED IN 1871” beside it. It quotes a director of the Royal Dutch Opera in 1900 praising a “remarkably beautiful tone and sound.” The identity is built on that past — the brothers, the gable, the Grand Duke and the Dutch queen — while the instruments are made by a modern joint venture in China.

For a design guide, Perzina shows a revival with a clear route: an East German asset sold after reunification, a Dutch owner of a name the Dutch court had once honoured, and a Chinese factory set up as a joint venture rather than a contract. The founding image — two brothers painting their name on a gable — is the brand’s best asset, and it is used as such.

For this guide we use a Baltic teal and a pale sea tone with a sturdy serif. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Perzina’s colour values, and nothing of its logo is reproduced.

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