Marketing in those days consisted of exhibiting instruments at fairs and exhibitions and participation in competitions determining the highest quality. Blüthner's first fair was in Merseburg, a town in the neighborhood of Leipzig, but soon he participated in many foreign competitions, where his instruments won the highest praise.
It was also essential to furnish instruments to the royal courts and Blüthner took great pride in being appointed as official supplier to the royal court of many European countries, among which were the German Kaiser, Queen Victoria, the Russian Tsar, the Danish King, the Turkish Sultan and of course the King of Saxony.
Export was an early goal of Blüthner. Considering the fact that Germany and many other European counties were still young political structures, concentrated mainly on their home market, protected by customs barriers, it speaks for the foresight of Julius Blüthner to have created a distribution network spanning the whole world. Many distributors are still flourishing, as for example the agency in Great Britain, founded in 1876 with which very strong ties still exist.
Conforming with the wisdom that only thorough knowledge of the product assures excellence it was considered a necessity for the sons of Julius Blüthner to learn the trade from scratch. So one of his sons, Bruno Bluthner, was sent to the USA to work with Chickering to gather information about modern production techniques. His brother, Robert Blüthner, was to study jurisprudence, and Hans Blüthner worked with his father in the Leipzig factory. The first World War did only slight harm to Blüthner, as also did the great economic crisis in 1929
