Gretel draws Finer Sounds’ identity by hand with a felt-tip pen

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.”