Audes

Many people do not know that there is a factory in Jõhvi where loudspeakers, amplifiers and accessories are made, and that they have been made there since 1938. The new Audes website had to bring this story to people. The hardest part was that the quality of a loudspeaker has to be heard, while on the web it can only be seen. The site had to talk about craftsmanship and materials in a way that lets visitors sense the quality without hearing a single sound. It also had to show how far the speakers of the Custom series can be shaped to your own taste.

The roots of Audes go back to 1935, when the Raadio-Elektrotehnika Tehas, a radio and electrical engineering factory known as RET, started work in Tallinn. It made radios and radiograms, later loudspeakers too, and for decades they carried the name Estonia. The Audes website has a page of its own for this story, where every era is described together with old photographs and catalogue pages.

Here we put the same story on the dial of an old radio. Turn the needle and see what the factory was making in a given year.

When the sound cannot be heard, the product has to speak for itself. That is why the Audes website shows the product large and keeps the text modest. The product pages talk about materials, and the history page tells of the factory's long road. All of it works just as well on a phone.

The speakers of the Custom series are made for home cinemas and living rooms, and every buyer puts together a set of their own. The speaker can be mounted on the wall or built into it, the cabinet can be matt or gloss, and the front can be left open or covered with a fabric grille. Across five models, that makes forty different sets.

So that buyers would not have to imagine them, we made a 3D render of every set and built a configurator into the website, where the picture changes the moment a choice changes. Here the speakers stand around the TV in a home cinema, and beneath them is the Audes Credenza, a piece of furniture with built-in speakers and a projector. Try it yourself, by day and in the evening.

The configurator shows the speaker in a room, but buyers also want to know what is inside the cabinet and in which versions the speaker can be ordered. On the Audes product pages, every model comes with 3D views and technical data. Below, they are brought together in one block, with the Custom 527 as the example: the numbers on the speaker tell you what is inside, and the buttons show the speaker's options. The cabinet can be matt or gloss, the front can be covered with a fabric grille, and the speaker can be built into the wall.

Our work together did not end when the website went live. We keep making marketing materials for Audes as the need arises, so that the factory looks the same wherever people meet it.