Pleyel, the world's oldest piano firm and the last still operating in France, has stopped even trying to compete with Chinese and Korean rivals on price and now focuses instead on innovative design.
The company's 15 workers ply their trade in a modern building near the national stadium in the downmarket Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
Currently their most prized product is an aubergine-coloured grand piano with a turquoise interior and transparent legs.
"That gives you the impression it's floating," said Pleyel's artistic director Arnaud Marion, adding that the spectacular instrument was conceived by the Paris-based US designer Hilton McConnico.
"Pianos have had the same shape for 250 years. They have an old-fashioned, dark, funereal air to them," said Marion. "Home interiors have changed, so if we want to get pianos in there we have to modernise them."
Pleyel, which began making pianos 203 years ago, is now putting its money on aesthetics, he said.
The latest McConnico is set to leave the Saint-Denis atelier in the coming weeks to be sold for around 95,000 euros (130,000 dollars), around the average price for a Pleyel piano these days.
The company has shifted its product range to the top end of the market for two main reasons.
The first was the Asian competition.
Pleyel realised it could never hope to churn out as many pianos as the Chinese and the Koreans, who control 80 percent of the global market by selling instruments that retail for as little as 2,000 euros.
The second was rapidly falling demand for pianos on the French market.
In the 1980s, 45,000 new pianos were sold here each year. Now just 8,000 are sold annually, said Marion.
So in 2007 Pleyel upped sticks and moved from Ales in the south of France to its current location in the Saint-Denis area, where it had previously been based for 100 years from 1865.
It also reduced its production from 1,700 pianos a year to just 25.
Marion, who was originally brought in as a "crisis manager," said that now the firm might soon even start making a profit, despite production being held up for several months last year after a fire at the premises.
Pleyel's current clients are people who want "a fine instrument made by a designer, an exceptional piece of work," such as one man who ordered a piano made from macassar ebony for his yacht, he said.
The firm was founded by the composer Ignace Pleyel and was the proud maker of pianos for the 19th-century Polish composer Frederic Chopin.
It also set up a concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, which in its modern form is a major classical music venue in the French capital.
These days, however, many concert pianists prefer models from makers such as Steinway of the United States.
Nevertheless, Marion proudly insists that the Pleyel brand is an "incarnation of the French exception."
Copyright 2010 AFP Global Edition
