Visible Vinyl
A case study on the creation of the Well Made product.
Let the music be seen.
Any record lover will tell you that once the vinyl hits the turntable, the album cover (and its artwork) are either returned to a stack in the shelf or placed on top of their turntable’s cover. Visible Vinyl explores the experience of enjoying music the analog way, and celebrating the artwork on the front of an album like it was meant to be loved; right alongside the musical content it stores.
Fit for the Well Made brand.
Visible Vinyl was a ground-up, collaborative effort under my direction to add a lasting, meaningful product to Well Made’s young but growing permanent collection in 2018. The “framing and organization” focused company aims to build a lasting impression on its customers by focusing on the celebration of objects or activities they love.
The mission from the start was to create a small, high-quality shelving piece that acts as the perfect “pedestal” to a record sleeve. Smaller housewares built to last a lifetime are a profitable D2C channel for Well Made where a talented, Chicago-based wood shop’s unique manufacturing + outsourcing strategy informs the tremendous quality behind lower price-point products like this.
The following touch points are the in-depth areas of exploration where my personal creative problem solving informed the product’s ultimate attributes.
Record Security
The edge treatment and thickness, as well as depth of shelf, needed to work in sync to stand up record sleeves of variable thicknesses. The front lip needed to be tall enough to stop a record from falling off from the occasional sleight of hand during transactions, no matter how many discs are left in the sleeve.
Including a lip on 3 sides of the shelf was no mistake. No matter how careful the end user might be, having their records fully captured from sliding off the shelf from the front and sides created a strong sense of security.
Installation
Commonly used installation hardware like keyhole brackets or floating shelf brackets are either large in size, an expensive addition to the cost of goods, or combination of both. A slim profile was preferred and could not accommodate these at-the-ready solutions.
Well Made is a wood shop at its core and constantly challenges the ease of installation for products on behalf of customers who aren’t quite as handy as the staff. The solution needed to be easily explained and pulled off by consumers who are at home, decorated by themselves.
CNC-made keyholes are fast, affordable and necessitate zero additional fabrication work after they are milled. They also allow the product profile to be, quite literally, as slim as possible, allowing the use a 0.75” overall product thickness without trouble.
Retail Packaging
Well Made always has believed that placing the same amount of design effort into packaging as the products they hold helps to build a reputation for high value products and builds a level of customer trust that will hopefully bring them back.
With Walnut, Black, and Oak finishes being the most popular across all Well Made products, the packaging for Visible Vinyl needed to make sense in all scenarios, i.e., on a store shelf clearly showing what the customer is purchasing. A sleeve and tray design made the most sense by mitigating costs on finish-specific purchases while using the same tray across all SKU’s.
A large part of making the customer’s installation experience as easy as possible was including an installation template inside the packaging tray, something that could have been a forgotten afterthought resulting in additional printed material inside the box. Instructions and “tape on the wall” mounting holes are thoughtfully laid out on the inside of each package.
The ultimate form was widely informed by the realization that a single piece construction paired with a 1-face CNC operation allowed for a beautiful, ultra minimal product. Deciding to use a CNC plunged keyhole slot in the product was no mistake and, while the product is clamped in place, it may as well get its captured trench at the same time. This reduces human effort down to crosscutting moulding, clamping for machining, and finish sand operations. This also creates the unique, soft termination of the trench that interacts with the customer’s record collection.
Composition
Solid oak or walnut-stained beech wood
Features
A single piece construction with CNC produced keyholes mounts fast and easy to the wall. Once installed the product perfectly holds 1-4 records of varying thicknesses. The product proportions tastefully compliment 12” record sleeves without distracting attention.
Implications
The success of this product lead Well Made to invest the next several years into further exploring the vinyl market, which was pictured as the second large product collection to fill out after art displays. It was manufactured in-house as well as Poland and landed Urban Outfitters into a client.