Zildjian
Cymbals cast, rolled and lathed in Norwell, Massachusetts by the oldest family business in America.
🇺🇸 Made in USA
Our assessment
Company details
Where Zildjian products are made
Zildjian’s cymbal factory has run here since 1973, and it is where the company’s proprietary bronze alloy is mixed. The formula has been kept inside the family for four centuries; Zildjian’s own leadership page notes that Debbie Zildjian was taught the secret alloy process by her father and still oversees it.
The drumstick and mallet plant. Hickory is dried, ground on centerless grinders, then weight-matched and pitch-paired into sticks — a process Zildjian describes as manned by human hands at every step.
Avedis Zildjian III moved the family cymbal business from Turkey to Quincy, Massachusetts in the late 1920s and incorporated the American company in 1929. Every cymbal the company has sold since has been made in the United States.
Headquarters, both factory locations and the Made in USA claim above are published by Zildjian on zildjian.com. The 1623 founding date and the 1929 United States incorporation are the company’s own.
The story
The story starts with an alchemist. In 1618 an Armenian metalsmith named Avedis was summoned to the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople to make cymbals for the Ottoman military bands. His alloy — copper, tin and a trace of silver — rang in a way nobody could reproduce. The sultan gave him a business in 1623 and a surname to go with it: Zildjian, cymbal maker.
For three hundred years the formula passed from father to son inside the family. Then in 1909 Avedis Zildjian III emigrated to the United States and went to work in a candy factory in Massachusetts. Two decades later his uncle Aram summoned him back to the business — not to Turkey, but to Quincy, Massachusetts, where the two of them began making cymbals on American soil. The Avedis Zildjian Company was incorporated here in 1929.
The timing was accidental but perfect. American jazz was inventing the modern drum kit, and it needed cymbals that could ride, crash and sizzle rather than crash alone. Zildjian built them, and in doing so built the sound of twentieth-century popular music. In 1973 the company moved into a purpose-built factory in Norwell, where the alloy is still mixed and the cymbals are still cast, rolled, hammered and lathed today.
Why they matter
Almost nothing else in a drummer’s kit is still made in America. Hardware, shells and heads long ago followed the rest of light manufacturing overseas. Zildjian is the conspicuous exception, and not by nostalgia — the alloy and the hammering are the product, and the company has judged that they cannot be sent abroad without losing what people are paying for.
That has second-order effects worth noticing. The 2010 merger with Vic Firth kept a 65,000-square-foot drumstick plant running in Newport, Maine, a town that had very little else. The 2018 addition of Balter Mallets moved another product line into the same American factories. In a category that emptied out, Zildjian has been consolidating manufacturing back into the United States rather than out of it.
It is also, by its own account, the oldest family business in the United States and one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the world — fifteen generations, still privately held, still making the thing it was founded to make, in a building you can drive to in Massachusetts.
Shop Zildjian products
Browse Zildjian cymbals stocked on the Buy American Campaign store.
Frequently asked questions
Are Zildjian cymbals made in the USA?
Yes. Zildjian states on its own website that all of its instruments are made in the USA, at the cymbal factory in Norwell, Massachusetts and the drumstick and mallet factory in Newport, Maine.
Where is Zildjian located?
Zildjian is headquartered at 22 Longwater Drive in Norwell, Massachusetts, with its drumstick and mallet operation in Newport, Maine and additional offices in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo.
How old is Zildjian?
The business dates to 1623 in Constantinople. The American company, the Avedis Zildjian Company, was formed in 1929 after the family moved cymbal production to Quincy, Massachusetts.
Is Zildjian still family owned?
Yes. Zildjian remains privately held by the Zildjian family, with fifteenth-generation family members serving on the board of directors.