Jonathan Grado

When I'm not photographing blue velvet, restrooms in Texas, or skaters living my childhood dream, I'm working with my company Grado Labs.

How Grado Labs Worked with Pokémon

One day I received an email with the subject line “The Pokémon Company Collaboration?”. I get reached out to a lot by licensing companies that just look to sell the use of popular brand names, which we always say no to (though we appreciate the thought). I didn’t get my hopes up when I saw this email come in. 

When I clicked the sender though, it had come from an @pokemon.com email address. I immediately got flashbacks to hoping I got a good report card so I’d have leverage in asking my parents for Pokémon cards. I had to take a seat.

What do the Pokémon Headphones Look Like?

There are countless ways we could have designed these headphones. There is so much to draw from when it comes to everything The Pokémon Company has done, that we needed to really reign in these design ideas. After almost two years of collaborating, The Pokémon Company x Grado Labs headphones were a real thing. For The Pokémon Company’s 25th anniversary, we worked on and designed four pairs for the Pokémon Audio Collection: metal Poké Ball, wooden Poké Ball, black metal Pikachu, and silver metal Pikachu headphones. My favorite of the pairs we designed are the wooden Poké Ball headphones. From the hint of red under the metal, to the wood carved to resemble a poke ball, my childhood is really partial to this one.

Grado Labs doesn't have that much physical space, so we need to save room wherever we can. This leads us to using the same pshycial box but changing the exterior for each headphone that is placed inside. We found a nice way to incportate our necessity of nimbleness with these pairs would be to use the same technique, but have pikachu adorn every box. Pikachu is just chilling on each one wearing headphones. These are now some of my favorite special editions Grados, along with the A24 headphones and Brooklyn Tree GH1 headphones.

How can you buy these Grado x Pokémon headphones? When Grado partners with companies for collaborations, it's up to the other company how they want to release and sell the headphones. These Pikachu and Poké Ball headphones were assembled by Grado but sold through The Pokémon Company, and at this point are sold out.

If you want to see a behind-the-scenes look at how the team at Grado assembled these collaboration headphones in Brooklyn, I put a photo gallery below.

Some of these photos can also be found in my series of commercial work.

‍