Jonathan Grado

For our 65th anniversary, Grado Labs had its first major redesign since being founded in 1953. Saying that our family puts sound first has never been just a marketing phrase. As long as the headphones and cartridges we design sound the way we want them to, it never really mattered what the box looked like. The box doesn’t change our sound - but after six decades, it felt like the right time to give it some attention. So for our 65th year, we teamed up with Brooklyn-based design studio High Tide to reimagine our branding and packaging.

You can see High Tide's case study on the redesign, as well as an interview with The Dieline about the new packaging. Keep reading for more on the development process.

“We’ve spent 65 years perfecting our sound, let’s spend some time polishing up our edges.” – Jonathan Grado

The source of every main Grado wordmark from 1953 to 2010 has become something of legend in our family. Our logos and branding came from wherever was most convenient at the time. For example, we needed new envelopes about 30 years ago, and the envelope company typed out our name. That version stuck, and we’ve had the same envelopes ever since. Now imagine that approach, but for almost everything except the headphones themselves.

Goals for the Grado Redesign

Our main goal was to polish up our edges and bring some cohesiveness to our packaging, while keeping the heritage of our company and family intact. Since this was our first branding project in 65 years, there was a lot to oversee. We focused on two priorities throughout the design process.

First is familiarity for longtime listeners. We wanted to make sure that someone who might’ve been listening with us since the 1970s, 60s, or even 50s, could see our new logo and still know it’s our family.

Second is unified and practical packaging. Before, you could look at all our boxes and not know they came from the same company. We also needed the boxes to be identical across products due to storage constraints. We simply don't have the space to store a unique box for each headphone. After assembly, a pair of headphones goes right into its box and straight to the listener. So, we created a flexible label system that could be customized per model while working with the overall design.

Design Details of the Packaging and Website

Our new regular, wide, and in-ear Grado boxes now feature a soft-touch material with black foil stamping. The wide boxes, which house our higher-end headphones, include a magnetic flap for a more premium feel.

The label system High Tide created for Grado is elegant and technical. These labels can be applied to any of our boxes depending on the headphones inside. They wrap around the back, bottom, and front face of the packaging to let you know which headphone is inside, no matter how they're stacked.

We started assembling our phono cartridges on a kitchen table in 1953. While we didn’t expect to still be assembling them decades later, we love them just as much now as we did then. The cartridge packaging hadn’t been updated since the 1970s, so we’re especially excited to see them in a new home.

Grado hasn’t advertised since 1964, so most people’s first interaction with us is either through a friend or our website. As part of the branding project, we also redesigned our homepage to reflect the same care we put into our packaging.

The idea was to create a beautiful showcase for our headphones. Since we already had strong product photography, we let that take center stage. We never want the site to feel overly "sales-y", it’s more about letting people experience everything for themselves.

The new site uses white space, large imagery, and a refined type system featuring Suisse Int'l, Suisse Works, and Suisse Int'l Mono from Swiss Typefaces. High Tide led the homepage design, which became the foundation for the rest of the site. We took it from there, with development handled by Jones Studio Limited.

A highlight of this project was being able to include other Brooklyn locals, so after bonding over music, we were happy to have High Tide come in and help us bring it all together.

A big thank you to High Tide, Danny, Jones Studio, and Eric.