Apple’s powerhouse headphone brand Beats has a new designer. See his first big product

I’m holding the box for Beats Studio3 headphones. They were released in 2017—in other words, a lifetime ago. The box is nothing short of peak packaging, with a hefty fiberboard frame that puts a hardcover book to shame, coated in no less than three finishes of black, with corners so sharp they threaten to break the skin. It takes two hands to lift off the lid, which holds on with a reluctant vacuum seal. All in all, it’s a staggering 1.5 pounds of packaging without cords or headphones inside. Its details connote quality. But also, excessive consumption.

Six years after the Studio3 release, esteemed artist, industrial designer, and streetwear designer Samuel Ross has stepped in as the company’s first principal design consultant (read our deep profile on the partnership here). Today we’re seeing his first wide-release product with Beats, the Beats Studio Pro. If you want to know the kind of impact he’ll have on the company, just start with the Studio Pro’s packaging.

Instead of a polished jewel box, it’s more of a refined egg carton. Constructed of recycled paper, its mottled-gray appearance seems to eschew excess dyes. It’s also just a third of the weight of the Studio3’s box—and it’s fully compostable.

Creating the packaging was a considerable investment; as Ross explains, his firm, SR_A, began developing this approach alongside Beats for a limited-edition Powerbeats Pro he worked on in 2022. As it turned out, the packaging work actually cost more to develop than the new headphones, but Ross believes it represents a necessary step forward in sustainable packaging. In any case, it’s easy to understand why, as Beats hopes to win over Gen Z—a generation raised on climate activist Greta Thunberg—it’s likely to prefer the new approach.

As for the headphones themselves, they’re still very much Beats as you know them, albeit with improved audio, USB-C support, and a more streamlined surface so that they resemble a consolidated object more than a collection of parts. 

Representing “what the future of Beats could look like from a more minimalist and utilitarian standpoint,” according to Ross, the Studio Pro silhouette is virtually unchanged from the Studio3, and only a keen observer might tell them apart. At a glance, you may miss that the earmuffs are now made from a one swatch of leather rather than two (ditching a cheap-looking stitch line), and you definitely won’t see that the cups have new memory foam lining that makes them sit on your ears more comfortably.

Ross also abandoned the blingy metallic hardware of the Studio3, and touches like a prominent “Beats” logo on top of the headband have been erased. The color itself, an earthy “sandstone” in the sample I see, feels more like subdued Skims than a glitzy mid-aughts tech company cofounded by Dr. Dre. (Other varieties include black, navy, and “deep brown.”)

While Ross’s work on the Studio Pro may be subtle, he suggests it’s just the start of his imprint on the brand—while he’s eyeing new developments that will redefine how we view Beats headphones themselves.

“What I’m proposing,” Ross promises, “is really quite radical in product.”