How a company from the gilded age could be the future of US manufacturing

By Joel Williams, CNN

(CNN) — Oversized crowbars bend wood for a piano’s rim. Circular sanders smooth rough edges on costly Sitka spruce soundboards. Hammers and chisels notch a bridge to allow piano strings to vibrate freely.

For 30 years, Bernard Craddock has been one of the roughly 200 workers handcrafting pianos at the 150-year-old Steinway & Sons factory in Astoria, a neighborhood in the New York borough of Queens.

“Everybody has a specific job here,” Craddock said, working on a piano frame. “My job is to set this straight for the hammers to hit the strings.”

President Donald Trump has vowed to start an American manufacturing renaissance, one of the main aims of his trade war. But manufacturing isn’t easy anywhere in the United States thanks to high costs, strict regulations and lack of workers with the necessary skills.

Steinway & Sons, however, is a rare bright spot in US manufacturing. A company that thrives because it doesn’t mass produce its product. Instead, it uses a small workforce of skilled craftsmen to produce a premium item — world-class pianos.

“They have this storied, legacy brand,” said Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “They can charge a premium for that, but they also are serving higher market segments that can afford to pay those premium prices and need to because they’re performing on pianos at the highest levels.”

Most US manufacturers are forced to compete on price, which has become tougher as Trump’s tariffs, especially on key inputs like steel, aluminum and copper, have raised prices.

But by making pianos many consider the best in the world, Steinway can charge high enough prices to keep its US-based operation up and running. A Steinway grand piano can be priced as low as $90,000 or as much as $200,000.

“I think we are the largest manufacturer remaining in New York City, we’re very proud of that. It’s not easy to continue to manufacture in New York,” Steinway & Sons CEO Ben Steiner told CNN.

Steiner said his company thrives because it focuses on quality merchandise.

“There’s no other way with the cost structure that we have to operate in New York City, or even operating in the United States or in Europe,” he added. “Unless you’re focused on quality and innovation, you’re not going to survive.”

Trump’s trade agenda could affect jobs

Despite the stated goal of reshoring manufacturing jobs, Trump’s tariffs on most US imports may be having the opposite effect.

The US shed another 12,000 manufacutring jobs in August, the latest data available, for the fourth month in a row. Roughly 42,000 jobs have been lost since April.

Hersh said Trump’s chaotic trade agenda is acting as a roadblock to factory hiring.

“Businesses don’t like (tariffs), but they can adjust to a reasonable tariff,” Hersh said. “(Trump has) created uncertainty for the economy that just has businesses sitting on their hands, not being able to make decisions about investment or to hire new workers.”

The White House told CNN that the goal of Trump’s policy is to ensure domestic manufacturers are able to source everything they need in the US, from inputs to workers.

“America cannot just be an assembler of foreign-made parts. The Trump administration is taking a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to reshore every step of the manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “There is no shortage of American hands and minds to build America’s next industrial Golden Age.”

But American manufacturing looks very different from five decades ago, when millions of workers were employed to perform specific tasks along assembly lines. After trade agreements flourished in the 1990s, many of those jobs moved abroad.

And in today’s age of automation and artificial intelligence, factory floors are increasingly filled with robots. That means US factories require fewer workers with specialized skills.

Like at Steinway, where making pianos suitable for the world’s best concert halls isn’t a quick process. Building a piano takes Steinway’s skilled craftsmen 11 months from start to finish. On average, workers complete only four or five pianos a day.

And because the piano’s many components are domestically sourced, Steiner said tariffs haven’t impacted them significantly.

“There’s minor impacts in certain materials, but because we manufacture in the United States, it’s not a major issue for us,” he said.

Maintaining a consistent workforce

While top-of-the-line pricing and domestic sourcing can solve a lot of problems for Steinway, it can’t solve them all.

One of the biggest challenges facing the piano maker is a potential shortage of Sitka spruce lumber, which Steiner said makes the very best instruments.

“For the Sitka spruce, we find that the best in the world comes from a particular part of Alaska where there’s a very short growing season,” he said. “As a consequence, the trees grow very slowly.”

And Steinway needs to make sure one other component is in good supply: skilled workers.

The factory in Astoria has been in almost continuous operation since 1873, with only temporary pauses in piano production during the Great Depression and World War II. During that time, the company produced glider parts for the war effort.

“It not only kept the lights on, so to speak, but it kept some of the valued craftspeople around,” said Anthony Gilroy, Steinway’s Vice President for Marketing and Communications. “The Steinways were smart enough to know that after the war you’d get a lot of people coming back willing to work but without the skills to build pianos, and you needed these old timers, if you will, here in the factory to train the next generation of piano makers.”

That’s part of the reason Steinway & Sons has never considered relocating out of New York City. It’s those highly specific jobs – performed by “old timers” like 30-year craftsman Craddock in the frame assembly department – why Steinway keeps calling Astoria home.

“The skills that they have, you can’t replicate it. You can’t just open up a factory somewhere else and have those skills,” said Steiner. “So long as our craftspeople are here I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t be, then we’ll still be making our pianos here.”

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