Jonathan Grado

When I'm not photographing blue velvet, restrooms in Texas, or skaters living my childhood dream, I'm working with my company Grado Labs.

How Grado Labs Worked with Pokémon

One day I received an email with the subject line “The Pokémon Company Collaboration?”. I get reached out to a lot by licensing companies that just look to sell the use of popular brand names, which we always say no to (though we appreciate the thought). I didn’t get my hopes up when I saw this email come in.

When I clicked the sender though, it had come from an @pokemon.com email address. I immediately got flashbacks to hoping I got a good report card so I’d have leverage in asking my parents for Pokémon cards. I had to take a seat.

Two Years of Designing with The Pokémon Company

In the very early stages of designing headphones, or any products that we've worked on for that matter, the conversation of "what is possible?" usually comes first. It's equally exciting as it is nerve-wracking. You're throwing all sorts of ideas out there to get the ball rolling, but of course there's always the chance of two issues: you hear ideas for something you don't want to work on or a design is landed on that you can't physically build.

We've worked with companies where everything is going great until they are adamant about a specific design we quite literally can't (or don't want to) build. It's best not to stay up late thinking about the what-ifs. With The Pokémon Company though, things went very smoothly in that brainstorming phase. Which was a relief! There are countless ways we could have designed these headphones. There is so much to draw from when it comes to everything The Pokémon Company has done, that we needed to really rein in these design ideas. We went back and forth on design details, mostly focused on how a Poké Ball and Pikachu could be woven into the design elements without having a negative effect on the sound.

Figuring that out took a bit of time, because there are some things we won't know until we try. Wanting to combine the design elements (Poké Balls, Pikachu) and materials (metal, wood) also meant we'd be working on four different headphones. We are very lean, and only have so much real estate on our workbenches. At this point we weren't sure if we could bring all four headphones to fruition. This was also during the pandemic which left a lot up in the air. Fortunately we found a way to allow these four headphones to find homes on the workbench space they'd need by refocusing our production line (this helped our other headphone models too because, again, pandemic).

What do the Pokémon Headphones Look Like?

For The Pokémon Company’s 25th anniversary, we worked on four pairs for the Pokémon Audio Collection: metal Poké Ball, wooden Poké Ball, black metal Pikachu, and silver metal Pikachu headphones. My favorite of the pairs we designed are the wooden Poké Ball headphones. The tooling for this design took some time and we went through a few iterations of it. The wood needed to have two separate pieces carved out with a "bridge" in the middle. While we're used to working with large pieces of wood, this was a thinner piece that became more fragile the more we took from it. Once the right balance was found between size and thickness, the last touch was the metal underneath. The metal is two-toned painted red and white and it really brought it all together. My childhood is really partial to this one.

That same space problem I mentioned earlier applied to our packaging too. This leads us to using the same redesigned physical box but changing the exterior for each headphone that is placed inside. Usually we have one or two headphone variations per collaboration, but with Pokémon there were four, and they all needed to use the same box. We worked around this by having Pikachu wearing headphones on each one and just changing the text below him. These are now some of my favorite special editions Grados, along with the A24 headphones and Brooklyn Tree GH1 headphones.

How can you buy these Grado x Pokémon headphones? When Grado partners with companies for collaborations, it's up to the other company how they want to release and sell the headphones. These Pikachu and Poké Ball headphones were assembled by Grado but sold through The Pokémon Company, and at this point are sold out.

If you want to see a behind-the-scenes look at how the team at Grado assembled these collaboration headphones in Brooklyn, I put a photo gallery below.

Some of these photos can also be found in my series of commercial work.