DEKO, our take on the record player, is about to drop.

Hey everyone,

Hope you had a super nice weekend. I've been in the Hudson Valley (upstate NY) this weekend, which has been a much-needed break.

For this week's memo, I'm going to bring you behind the scenes into what it's like designing a new product from scratch… In this case, I'm going to focus on DEKO, our take on a record player (FYI, it's available for pre-order on 11/20).

I think any great product really starts with a personal "why"—a driving reason strong enough to make the product impossible for me to ignore. With DEKO, the reason was quite simple: I love collecting and listening to music on vinyl, but there are no record players under $1,000 that I love. Generally, record players are designed as a total nod to the past, which makes sense given they're ultimately retro technology. However, we wanted to use this incredible format from the past to influence a design for the future—something that draws inspiration from the past but looks completely new and fresh. We also wanted to make this form of listening accessible to our customers (mostly Gen Z like us). To do so, we knew it'd make sense to make the player Bluetooth-enabled, which was easier said than done given the physical and spatial constraints of our design.

My good friend and industrial designer Nicolas and I began throwing ideas into a Pinterest board some months back. Our goal was to create something chic, sleek, and vibrant. We wanted this record player to double as a piece of modern art in our apartments, offices, etc. It couldn't just be a utility; it needed to be an object of pride.

After months of iterating the design and piecing together the engineering, we were finally able to lock in the final version with our supplier. We began sourcing all the materials, reengineering the firmware, and perfecting the design for factory-scale production. It's been a very detailed and delicate product to bring to life—but we're finally here. I couldn't be prouder of this machine; it's so stunning and human. It's a creative expression. And in two days, it no longer belongs to us, but to you.