Shout! Factory Makes Packages 'Pop'
...Like the Music And Videos It Reissues

By Patrick Henry

Let the critics and the sociologists duke it out over what "pop culture" is and isn't--here's a much handier definition. Pop culture is whatever you find in the time machine-like experience of perusing the Shout! Factory product catalog. And, because pop culture always makes the package the expression if not the essence of the product, chances are good that whatever you rediscover here will be something with packaging as vividly remembered as the vintage music or video recording inside.

Shout! Factory, which calls itself a "broad-based, retro pop-culture entertainment company focused on both audio and visual products," is the kind of company that's good at leveraging the specialized but enduring appeal of oddball TV shows and middle-of-the-road instrumental albums that topped the charts 40 years ago. As an entertainment label, the Los Angeles based firm wears its brand fairly lightly, preferring to let the reissues and compilations in its library speak directly to the marketplace in their own nostalgic or outlandish voices.

At the heart of Shout! Factory's marketing strategy is package design, through concepts that either keep strict faith with the look of the original productions or present the material in novel but still reverential ways. Held as important to a package's appeal as its graphic design are the extras with which it rewards purchasers: newly written liner notes, souvenir booklets, and other bonus items intended to make consumers want the package as much as they want the CD or DVD it contains.

Retro, and proud of it

Shout! Factory's keen sense of its market has deep roots. The company was started in 2003 by Richard Foos, a co-founder of Rhino Records, the music industry's best known reissuer of archival and eclectic entertainment. Also joining the start-up after long stints at Rhino were Bob Emmer and Foos's brother, Garson Foos. Shout! Factory burst upon the scene in February of that year with the release of Rhythm Love and Soul: The Sexiest Songs of Soul, a 60-track box set released as a companion to a PBS documentary of the same title.

Today Shout! Factory asserts that its taste in entertainment rests upon remaining "dedicated to what you grew up on but never outgrew"--a slogan that almost but not quite captures the quirky diversity of its rapidly expanding product catalog.

Garson Foos, president and general manager, says that as a purveyor of entertainment, Shout! Factory is opportunistic: happy to package and sell whatever will appeal to pop-culture fans. By and large, he says, that audience is male and over 30--a demographic with a ready ear for Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, The Turtles, and other music acts of comparable style and chronology.

But, Shout! Factory isn't exclusively or even primarily a recycler of easy-listening standards as soundtracks for the journey into middle age. Recent releases of videos chronicling the careers of Violent Femmes, The Flaming Lips, and the Sex Pistols suggest that the company doesn't tie its definition of "pop" to genres or to decades. Aficionados of jazz, blues, soul, and R&B, for example, will find the catalog a trove of essential but hard-to-find recordings by such greats as Solomon Burke and Rev. Gary Davis.

Jeff Palo, senior director of production, notes that video, not audio, represents the biggest piece of Shout! Factory's business. Typical of these offerings is the company's reissue of the Second City Television (SCTV) comedy series as a home video collection. Each of the three boxed sets in the series contains five DVDs and an editorial extra--a 20-page booklet with historical text and photos of special interest to old fans and new admirers of the SCTV troupe's oeuvre.

Grass-roots freak-out?

Shout! Factory's DVD package for NBC's short-lived Freaks and Geeks series contains an 80-page, foil-stamped and embossed "yearbook" featuring photos, script pages, a trivia quiz, and other bonuses.

The company tapped an even richer vein of cult demand with the release of the Deluxe Edition of Freaks and Geeks, a short-lived but much-praised TV series about the travails of a group of high school misfits. Noting that nearly 40,000 former viewers had signed an online petition pledging to buy a DVD release, Shout! Factory responded with a package configured as an 80-page, foil-stamped and embossed fabricated yearbook chock full of photos, script pages, an F&G trivia quiz, and other bonuses. Its set of eight DVDs includes all 18 episodes from the series' one season as well as deleted scenes and other esoterica for die-hard devotees.

Audio re-releases, however, best typify Shout! Factory's dual approach to package design for entertainment. Foos says that in the straight re-release of an album or a series of albums, it's important to keep the authenticity and the integrity of the original design in place: "So, we really don't mess with it." The way to reinvigorate the interest of the fans, he continues, is to add updated liner notes and photography to a well-remembered package that consumers have already demonstrated their willingness to purchase.

On the other hand, says Palo, Shout! Factory treats multi-disc sets and compilations as opportunities to create new packages with covers and other design elements that connect with consumers in a more original fashion.

Tale of two horn-blowers

Respectively embodying the two design schemes are the repackaged recordings of a pair of pop-culture icons with little in common besides the Shout! Factory label: a trumpet-playing bandleader who upstaged even The Beatles in the mid-1960s with his "Ameriachi" sound; and a caustic stand-up comedian credited with changing, for better or worse, America's attitude toward the limits of permissibility in public speech.

Shout! Factory's re-release of Herb Alpert's 1965 album, Whipped Cream and Other Delights, is a case study in the wisdom of not messing with what can't be improved upon. Even so, in updating the packaging, Shout! Factory initially had a hard time maintaining visual status quo.

Ownership of the album, with its famous cover shot of a young woman apparently clad in nothing but the toothsome topping of the title, had changed hands since the LP's initial release, and the original artwork couldn't be located. So, says Palo, the hunt was on for album covers in close to mint condition. By carefully scanning first-generation jackets, the image of the whipped cream girl was restored to all of its gooey glory for the album's reissue on CD.

The album, which lasted for 141 weeks in the Top 40 charts of its day, now is a part of the "Herb Alpert Signature Series," Shout! Factory's digitally remastered collection of vinyl recordings by Alpert and his TJB ensemble. Each album in the collection--Whipped Cream, released last month, is the fourth--bears the Signature Series logo and comes with a 20-page booklet detailing the tracks and the numerous highlights of Alpert's long career. To the added delight, no doubt, of old-school playboys and latter-day swingers, Shout! Factory has also repurposed the creamy cover shot as a poster-sized pullout.

"Writing the book" on Bruce

According to Palo, the production of Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware was a labor of love that the Foos brothers had in mind for Shout! Factory from the beginning. He says that in this project, "we felt that the editorial content was equal in significance to the audio content." It was believed, therefore, that the packaging should emphasize the compilation's value as a reference source for students of Bruce's life and work.

The set, containing six CDs of public and unreleased performances as well as personal recordings, also features 80 pages of illustrated text by the late comic's daughter, Kitty Bruce, record producer Hal Willner, and publisher/satirist Paul Krassner. It was clear, says Palo, that the traditional 6" x 9" telescoping box wouldn't suffice for the desired presentation. So Shout! Factory turned to Tornado Design, an L.A. creative studio specializing in entertainment advertising and packaging, for something more effective.

Rising to the challenge, Tornado crafted the package not as a typical boxed set but as a perfect-bound, 9 1/4" x 11" hardcover book. Six of its pages are paperboard sleeves resembling old 78 RPM record wrappers that serve as carriers for the CDs. An L-shaped promotional card wrapping the spine and the back cover can be removed by consumers after retail purchase.

The blood-red front cover, depicting Bruce with a swatch of duct tape slapped across his unstoppable mouth, is arrestingly realistic even though the appearance of the tape is an illusion: a photographic image embossed with spot metallic ink to give it all of the texture and surface reflectivity of the real thing. Palo says that the provocative package was nominated for two Grammy awards in 2004 and will be a Shout! Factory entry in the Alex Entertainment Packaging Awards competition this year.

'Collective intelligence' outsourced

Foos notes that although the company can trust its "collective pop culture intelligence" to furnish general inspiration for package design, it doesn't have an art director on staff to execute its ideas. In fact, Shout! Factory outsources all of its creative requirements, working with about 10 outside providers including studios like Tornado Design as well as independent contractors. Palo says that production services are provided by AGI Klearfold, which supplies much of the music packaging and is the company's primary supplier of video packaging. Shorewood Packaging and Ivy Hill Graphics also manufacture packages for Shout! Factory. Sonopress USA is the vendor of choice for digital media replication.

According to Jeff Smith, a principal of Tornado Design, succeeding as a package designer to Shout! Factory means sharing both its pop-culture intelligence and its respect for the look of the original materials. These appear to be natural inclinations for the Grammy Award winning agency, founded 13 years ago by Smith and his partner, Al Quattrochi.

Smith says, "People are always calling us the retro guys" because of the agency's affinity for vintage entertainment. He explains that in developing packages like those in the Alpert series, the studio's goals are to stay true to the period look of the original covers and, when necessary, to "bring the art back to the best state it can be." Logos and other new design elements are added in a way that updates the presentation without diluting the pop flavor that made the product a hit when it was new.

The agency has completed about 20 projects for Shout! Factory, including the Alpert, Bruce, SCTV, and Freaks and Geeks collections. The creative brief doesn't include a great deal of fanfare for the house brand, which usually is conveyed by modest placements of the Shout! Factory emblem on spines and back covers. The client "doesn't really try to have 'a' style or a 'label look,'" says Smith.

Foos concurs: "We don't try to do it in an overt way." He says that when a package is special, it speaks for itself via consumer dialog on amazon.com, chatter on pop-culture message boards, and hype at fan-oriented Web sites. Shout! Factory sometimes amplifies the buzz for a package by mentioning its unique attributes in ads that run in Entertainment Weekly, Blender, Rolling Stone, and other consumer media.

Shout! Factory customers can order online from amazon.com or directly from www.shoutfactory.com, but the bulk of sales comes from traditional retail: chain outlets for music and video, independent stores, and general retailers including Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Best Buy. Foos notes that in these competitive environments, a package might owe its drawing power to any of a number of features: an unusual packaging material; a unique size; a decorative touch, such as foil stamping; or a book-like configuration, as in the Lenny Bruce and Freaks and Geeks items. "Other times," he says, "it's just good design." The format of the package doesn't necessarily have to be unique, but the package has to have "unbelievably eye-catching graphics."

No such thing as a virtual package

But, these days, how much do format and graphics really matter to consumers growing accustomed to downloading audio and video straight from the Internet without any packaging at all? Do consumers of digital entertainment care less about packaging than people did in the days when a whipped cream girl on an album cover was a pop-culture sensation?

Foos acknowledges that the times have changed, but he doesn't foresee any permanent erosion of the marketing appeal of a well designed package. He observes that because of the Internet, many younger consumers are "being trained not to care as much about packaging and sound quality" as their older counterparts. But Foos also points out that sophistication and affluence can increase with age, and that as they do, maturing consumers learn to appreciate the value of the packaging when they shop for recorded entertainment.

Retro-centric though it may be, Shout! Factory has no quarrel with the Internet--the company sells its wares online, and, according to Palo, even uses Apple's iTunes downloading service as one of its many distribution channels. But, as a niche marketer to an audience with tastes that defy time and trends, the company knows that even in a digital age, pop culture still needs packaging if it's to remain popular.

Palo says that it's a matter of producing "the highest quality reissues possible" in packages that combine appealing design, respect for the source, and must-have bonus material. That way, consumers will feel confident "that we've done the product justice, and that they are getting their money's worth."