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Gretel draws Finer Sounds’ identity by hand with a felt-tip pen
The branding strategy for Finer Sounds emphasizes a charmingly awkward identity that balances accessibility and aspiration, achieved through hand-drawn design elements. This approach allows the brand to feel both personal and sophisticated without tipping into pretension, creating a welcoming atmosphere for music shoppers. The deliberate use of a limited design toolkit ensures flexibility and room for growth while maintaining a cohesive visual identity.
The Brand Identity: Imagine you’re a kid in school, and someone asks you to draw something fancy. You don’t have calligraphy tools or any real training – just a felt-tip pen from your drawer. The resulting, slightly wobbly attempt at elegance sits at the heart of Gretel’s identity for Finer Sounds, a curated vinyl and audio goods shop at Ace Hotel Brooklyn.
The local branding, strategy and design studio has built a visual language around what it calls a “naive line” – marks that aspire to sophistication but are drawn with deliberate looseness, as though the person holding the pen knows what fancy looks like but hasn’t quite figured out how to get there. Finer Sounds is the creation of David Azzoni and Shota Iyobe, who founded the shop in 2025 with a straightforward belief: music shopping should be welcoming, inspiring and effortless.
The store stocks a curated selection of vinyl, turntables, headphones and audio essentials, prioritising a handful of thoroughly vetted recommendations over endless shelves. It’s both a cosy physical storefront and an online shop, designed to put people at ease whether they’re new to vinyl or lifelong collectors. “Just what people need, but friendly, personable and absolutely not pretentious,” is how Executive Creative Director Ryan Moore characterises the founders’ philosophy. “Finer, not Finest Sounds.” That distinction proved critical to the design direction.
Gretel came on board early, helping to conceive an identity that the studio describes as charmingly awkward – a mix of accessible and aspirational that never tips into pretension. "We wanted it to feel like an attempt, an idea of something fancy drawn in an unfancy way,” Moore explains. “Something you might doodle in the margin of a school notebook.” The design direction came from Suyoung Yang, a Senior Designer at Gretel, who drew most of the brand by hand. She worked alongside another designer, Yeni Kim, to build out a small library of icons, illustrations and hand-rendered typography.
“We imagined the brand was being designed by someone who saw calligraphy as fancy but hadn’t studied it,” explains Dylan Mulvaney, Head of Design at Gretel. “Their aspiration is completely genuine. They’re not being ironic. They just don’t have a Speedball pen and chiselled nib, so they’re making do with a felt-tip from their junk drawer.” Yang drew dozens of versions using a fixed pen at a fixed scale, committing to each mark rather than nudging bezier curves on screen. Every element in the final suite – the logo, the monogram and a stretchy F–S device – is hand-drawn.
Digitisation came later, and its only purpose was making the marks reproducible across applications. Mulvaney credits Yang’s particular sensitivity for the outcome. “She was exceptionally good at calibrating exactly how much imperfection is right,” he shares. “That isn’t something you can creative-direct. It has to come from the person holding the pen.” Gretel’s process for arriving at this direction was unusually open. Rather than assigning a dedicated design team, Moore made the first round opt-in, inviting anyone in the studio to participate solo or in collaboration.
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The article discusses a unique hand-drawn branding approach for a specific company, which is significant for the design industry and offers actionable insights for brand strategy professionals.