Apple has a reputation as the most secretive design company in the world, employing a tight-knit group of designers—many of whom you’ve never seen or heard of—to develop its products. But now, Apple’s headphone brand Beats is tapping an external designer to usher in its next era of product design.
Samuel Ross is the first principal design consultant for Beats. And even if you don’t know his name, once you read his credentials, you may not be surprised. He’s the perfect fit for a brand that needs a strong industrial design point of view, and also a fashionable cultural cachet.
At a time when Apple design is facing a substantial cultural shift, Ross is stepping into Beats as something of an auteur, to chart a new future for the headphone company. He plans to use his role to position Beats as a confident counterpoint to Apple, from within Apple.
Ross is a celebrated, cross-medium British artist and designer, who runs the industrial design firm SR_A and the street-inspired fashion label A-COLD-WALL*. He’s as comfortable with powder-coated steel as Japanese nylon, and as grounded in the strictness of brutalism as amorphic asymmetry. He’s collaborated on products—with an emphasis on shoes, in particular—alongside some of the biggest companies in the world, including Nike, Converse, Dr. Martens, and Eastpak.
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