Carlo Petosa’s 1922 workshop.

Petosa Accordions is an American family firm. Carlo Petosa, born in 1892 in Vinchiaturo, Italy, emigrated to the United States as a teenager, played the vaudeville circuit and apprenticed at an accordion maker in San Francisco before founding his own business in 1922, in the basement of his Seattle home.

The family has run it ever since. HistoryLink, Washington State’s online encyclopedia, traces the line: Carlo, then Joe Sr. (1925–2005), then Joe Jr., who took over in 1980, then Joey, who joined in 2010; the company’s team page lists a fifth-generation family member. Carlo died in 1959 on a trip to Italy.

The firm has moved with Seattle. From 1955 it worked from a shop on NE 45th Street, which closed at the end of 2017; it reopened in Lynnwood in January 2018, and the company says that in 2026 it is moving to Cashmere, in central Washington, with an online showroom. Its customers have included Dick Contino, who played a 27-pound Petosa AM-1100, Krist Novoselic of Nirvana and Clifton Chenier, who bought one at the Seattle shop in 1979. HistoryLink reports that an original Gary Larson cartoon about heaven’s harps and hell’s accordions hung in the shop, signed “With apologies.”

Made in Castelfidardo, finished in Washington.

Where a Petosa is made is the key question, and the company and the press frame it differently. Petosa’s FAQ says its accordions “have been made in Seattle, WA and Castelfidardo, Italy,” and that in 1945 it began a partnership with the Zero Sette factory in Castelfidardo, with which it now shares space with the maker Bugari.

The Seattle Times, in 2022, was more specific: until 1945 every Petosa was built in Seattle; since then about 25 Italian craftsmen have built them to Petosa’s design, and “all the customization is done in Lynnwood, where every new accordion also gets a top-to-bottom inspection.” Joe Petosa Jr. put it plainly: “Even though it’s not made here, it’s still our product, and we control every aspect of the instrument.”

Its flagship is the AM-1100, the “Artist Model,” which the Seattle Times priced at $18,000, said took 18 months to build, and described as “billed as the Stradivarius of accordions.” The paper put sales at about 350 instruments a year, against about 200 a month at the peak, with prices from $4,500 to $40,000. HistoryLink says the firm exhibited a patented built-in sound chamber at the NAMM trade show in Chicago in 1953. In 2024 the firm added diatonic accordions aimed, it says, at the “regional Mexican music scene.”

Accordions, by the numbers.

The accordion is younger than most instruments. In Vienna, Cyrill Demian received a patent on 23 May 1829 for an instrument he called the Accordion: a box of free reeds sounded by a bellows.

Accordions still have their own line in the European customs code. Under CN code 9205 90 10, “Accordions and similar instruments,” Eurostat records that Italy exported €22.37 million of them in 2024 — 9,998 instruments, an average of about €2,240 each. In 2007 Italy exported 16,905, worth €14.47 million: fewer instruments now, but more money for each one.

The United States is Italy’s largest market for them, at €5.46 million in 2024, followed by Germany at €2.82 million and China at €2.56 million. Germany’s own exports that year were €3.91 million, about a sixth of Italy’s.

The same figures show the price gap at the bottom of the market. In 2024 the European Union imported 69,520 accordions and similar instruments from China for €2.56 million, about €37 each — against Italy’s average export price of more than €2,000.

The accordion has also lost ground in the tariff tables. Until 2007 the Harmonized System gave it its own heading, 9204, “Accordions and similar instruments; mouth organs”; since then it has been folded into heading 9205, among the wind instruments. In March 2022 the European Union banned exports to Russia of musical instruments worth more than €1,500 as luxury goods, accordions among them (Regulation 2022/428).

Many accordion makers cluster in and around Castelfidardo, in the Marche, but it was never the only accordion town. In Stradella, in Lombardy, Mariano Dallapè began series production in 1876, and the town says 44 accordion factories have existed there since. In 2026 Stradella is marking the 150th anniversary with a project called “Formazione armonica,” which includes a new accordion museum in the town’s former court building.

Outside Italy the trade has been fragile. France’s oldest maker, Maugein of Tulle, was placed in liquidation in September 2024 and revived by a former employee in 2025; in Germany, the Weltmeister manufactory in Klingenthal, a town that has made accordions since the nineteenth century, filed for insolvency in autumn 2023.

The instrument sits inside protected traditions, too. UNESCO’s 2015 inscription of the traditional vallenato music of Colombia’s Greater Magdalena region, on its list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding (decision 10.COM 10.A.2), names the accordion alongside the caja drum and the guacharaca.

Petosa sits at the meeting point of those figures: an American family brand, selling into Italy’s biggest export market, whose instruments are themselves part of Italy’s exports.

A family name, written small.

Petosa’s brand is a family and a city. Its website writes the name in lowercase — “petosa” — and its story is told in generations: a founder, his son, a grandson who took over in 1980, a great-grandson and now a fifth generation. Its most-quoted line, from Joe Jr., is a definition of what a brand means when the factory is elsewhere: design, control and finishing, rather than building every part. A 1955 newspaper description of the shop, with its “rows of jet-black, pearl-white, and even bright-red and green accordions,” gives this guide its palette.

For a design guide, Petosa shows a family brand that has stayed honest about an Italian supply chain while keeping its American identity. Compare Bugari, with whom it shares factory space in Castelfidardo, and Gabbanelli, a Houston family brand also built in Italy.

For this guide we use a jet black and a pearl with a lowercase sans, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument or logo is reproduced.

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