In late 2016, I was feeling the weight of my next career move. I was mourning the loss of my mother, and feeling especially drawn to my Italian heritage. Around that time, I had heard rumblings in the industry about a brand out of Italy called Dexibell. That Christmas, I flew to Italy and spent time with family in Rome before traveling on to Abruzzo, home of the Proel Group. Our first meeting was at what was then Dexibell's design studio in nearby Marche, a region I knew well. I had been studying at the Dante Alighieri school there since I was a teenager.
The view from the Hill of the Infinite in Recanati, in the Marche. Photo: Claudio Stanco, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Together, we worked out how we could possibly launch Dexibell in America. The odds were not in our favor. The digital piano market here belonged to a dominant few, well-positioned titans long established with dealers and players alike. How would an Italian brand almost nobody here knew find its way in among them?
What drew us in was the sound: a monastic dedication to perfect sound, uniquely Italian. The marketplace needed exactly that, and it seemed worth everything it would ask of us. We came home with a plan, and with a second decision: to open Proel North America, a new distributor nobody here had heard of, to carry it. A new company and a little-known brand, both at once.
The plan was simple to say and hard to do. Start with a handful of the most influential dealers in the United States and Canada, whose reach spans the continent and whose platforms could lift a new brand into view around the world. Earn their trust, and the rest would more easily offer theirs.
First, we had to show that a dollar invested in Dexibell would not take a dollar away from the brands a dealer already carried. That meant understanding every detail of how these pianos were different, so we weren't crowding the same waters but opening new ones. Nothing else on the floor sounded or looked like them. The home uprights and mini grands came in bold, modern cabinets, each one a postcard from Italy, the land of supercars. Second, the line was small and carefully curated. With just a few units, a dealer could carry the entire range and proudly say so. The risk was lower, though never low.
The Dexibell VIVO H10V. Photo: Dexibell.
Looking back, no new brand starts from zero. It starts on trust someone else already gave. When a dealer put the first Dexibell on their floor, they weren't trusting Dexibell; they didn't know it yet. They were trusting relationships built over a lifetime in this industry, and the people at Proel who had been building instruments long before Dexibell existed. That trust traveled, from them to us, and from us to a brand that hadn't earned it yet.
A gift like that comes with a responsibility. We honor it the only way that counts: by delivering. The piano arrives when we said it would. The call gets returned. The problem gets solved, even when solving it is expensive. Every promise kept is a way of saying thank you. We still think about the first dealers who said yes, and we still feel the weight of it.
Every promise kept is a way of saying thank you.
Trust is everything in our industry, and it can be broken. Too often a dealer takes a chance on a brand, and once that brand grows big enough, it goes around them, straight to consumers or through third-party platforms that amount to the same thing. The dealers who carried us when no one knew our name deserve better. Earning their trust was only the beginning. Keeping it is the work of every day.
Proel North America turns ten next year. There were no guarantees at the start, and there still aren't. We keep investing our lives in it, and risking our futures on it, because it was never one person's. As I shared with the students at CSUN, the designers and engineers, the artists, the people in the back office, everyone in the chain has their life in it. And at the end of that chain is the musician, who trusts these instruments with their own time and carries their music further into the world. Products this masterful are worthy of that time. We owe it to all of them.
Whenever we start something new, a company, a brand or a new chapter of our own, we're carried at first by the trust others place in us. We don't get to set it down once we've arrived. We honor it, every single day.
Start before we're known. Then spend every day being worth knowing.