JIM D. said:
Chinese made Excaliburs are the same as your Black Diamond distributor sells. They are both re- badged Parrots. There are 3 firms in China making accordions, 2 of them make accordions that I cant comment about in mixed company, The firm making the Parrot brand is now making accordions equal and some superior to the current German Weltmeister firm. JIM D.
Hi – we’ve just been alerted to this discussion by a confused potential customer:
Whilst I bow to Jim Ds extensive knowledge of the Chinese accordion market, there is one small but
extremely important detail about the old and the new Parrot brands which I feel ought to be pointed out.
The original Parrot factory was founded in 1954 in Tianjin and produced boxes which most accordionists knew well. Some hated them, some absolutely loved them, but most were indifferent to them as bog-standard generic Chinese squeezeboxes.
For whatever reasons, but probably because they did not raise their game in an increasingly differentiated and competitive Chinese market, Parrot went belly-up in 2003. In the new deregulated China, they have a similar system to that in the UK when a company goes bust: the administrator sells the brand name when winding up the dissolved company. This is what happened to the name ‘Parrot’ - it was sold to a start-up factory, also in Tianjin, who have produced under that name for the last few years.
The old, original, Parrot factory retained its highly skilled workforce, but relaunched under the new name of BaiDi, and, most importantly, its new management addressed the issues which contributed to the old Parrot going bust. It is this factory that produces the Black Diamond range.
Of course there are those on this forum and elsewhere who dismiss everything Chinese out of hand. But these days, saying that all the accordions made in contemporary China are rubbish is like saying, for example, that all the cars made in Italy are perfect (and having owned an Alfa that fell to bits on me, I can attest they are not!).
The Chinese market has differentiated, and, as Jim D has pointed out here and on other threads, there is now significant daylight between the bottom and the top ends of the market, and the top end is raising its game (and its prices!) all the time.
Suffice to say that to describe Black Diamond instruments as ‘re-badged Parrots’ could be misleading those who are unaware that the former Parrot factory (now BaiDi), which makes our accordions for us, to our own specification (we certainly don’t simply rip off another badge and apply our own!!) is completely unconnected to the factory now producing accordions which bear the name ‘Parrot’.
cheers
Greg
