Only has rebranded Cambridge Audio, the much-loved British hi-fi brand founded in 1968.
The Manchester-based studio, co-founded by brothers Daniel and Matthew Tweddle, started working with the company at the end of 2023. Cambridge Audio wanted an agency that had experience in both music and industrial design, as the new identity feeds across product, digital, and marketing and comms.
Nick Udall, head of marketing at Cambridge Audio, says the work was prompted by a need to attract and engage a broader range of users.
He says the company had “an early mover advantage” when it first got into streaming, but its brand still tended to speak to the older, male audience that tends to dominate the hi-fi market.
“When you look at the data from the streaming giants, there are more female listeners than male,” Udall explains. “We needed to change not just the brand, and how we look and feel to a younger and more diverse audience, but also the product set that goes with it.”
As with many projects which look to modernise legacy brands, the challenge was to attract new people without alienating the loyal, existing customer base – “If we get something wrong, we’ll be the first to know about it,” Udall laughs.
Daniel Tweddle, Only’s strategy director, says the key thing was to “avoid the temptation to pivot everything towards the sensibilities and tastes of the new demographic you’re trying to reach.”
“The thinking here was not to pivot from one group to another, but to broaden out the definition of who we were trying to speak to,” he explains. “What do they have in common? It’s passion and enthusiasm for music, so we wanted to build around that feeling.”
For Matt Savage, Cambridge Audio’s lead designer, this diversity made it a tricky brief. “It’s a hard brand to pin down,” he explains. “We sell £99 headphones, and we sell £5,000 amplifiers. That’s a fairly broad church.”
Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio
And both Savage and Udall say the brand had to resonate internally too, among staff whose shared love of music manifests in different ways.
“The company is made up of music fans,” Udall explains. “We have everyone from pioneering ex-dubstep DJs all the way to me, who wanted to be the fourth guitarist in Iron Maiden. The challenge was to unlock some of that authenticity and embrace that with a fierceness we’ve maybe been scared to show before.”
The previous branding had become quite confused – at one point Udall says there were five different logo variations in the market. Matthew Tweddle, Only’s creative director, says the most recent version was quite “corporate,” while Daniel Tweddle says there was a tendency to show up in a very technical way, which could make the products seem inaccessible.
“We wanted to make it easier to create desirability and emotional connection,” he says.
Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio
The company had already honed in on a brand idea – “made by music” – and wanted to keep the mark, which is a small circle inside a bigger one.
But Only changed the way the mark is used with the logotype, allowing them to appear independently – “to give them more power in different contexts” – and redrew the logotype.
This was a tricky job, Matthew Tweddle explains, because of the many manufacturing and production processes that shape how it appears. “There are so many ways that it’s seen on the products,” he says. There was a lot of consideration about the weighting of each letter and a lot of nuance in the way it’s designed.”
A new type system, built around Klim Type Foundry’s Söhne and Tiempos Headline, balances “attitude and confidence” with a more “high-end premium audio bit.”
“It allows us to communicate in a wide range of tones to different audiences at different times, while always feeling consistent,” Matthew Tweddle says.
Only’s new type for Cambridge Audio
The colour palette focuses on black and white, but there are other colours, inspired by designs from the Cambridge Audio archives, which are being rolled out too, most notably a burnt orange.
Over the period of working together, Matthew Tweddle says they encouraged the Cambridge Audio team “to take design as seriously as they do engineering.” Through those conversations, “the scope of what started out as an identity project has grown and grown.”
Daniel Tweddle says the new audiences the brand wants to reach “really care about the aesthetics of the products, not just great sound,” and that had to shape every design decision, from the product screens’ UI to the packaging and the new website.
“The technology has always been amazing, but the interface itself, and the design of some of those elements, didn’t give you that immediate sense of a best-in-class experience,” he says.
Udall says the response to the new look has already been encouraging. “My inbox is buzzing and I have had people reaching out who would never normally be reaching out,” he says. “It’s giving us the ability to talk to different audiences.”
That manifests in new collaborations with “brands you would never have thought we would be in the same conversation with, let alone working with.”
The recent tie-up with Rough Trade and Selfridges is a good example, he says, showing how the new branding is helping them reach new retail spaces.
And Savage says the work has had a huge impact on the hard-to-impress Cambridge Audio team too.
“One of the unsung benefits of a rebrand is the day-to-day clarity it provides to those who work with the brand and the guidelines,” he says. “Every project now happens with more fluency and more purpose, because everyone has this unified vision. Brands flourish in that environment.”
Only’s newpackaging for Cambridge Audio
Only’s new art direction for Cambridge Audio
Only’s new identity for Cambridge Audio
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