Collector's Edition of Ray Charles Music Is Presented in a Portable Record Player

Shorewood Packaging re-created the look and feel of a portable record player in exquisite detail for this eight-disc Ray Charles collector's edition.

Ray Charles' extraordinary career spanned seven decades, and even focusing on one decade is a large undertaking. Rhino Entertainment, a Warner Music Group Company, decided to pay tribute to Charles with a collector's edition box set of his early Atlantic Records recordings in the 1950s, and titled it Ray Charles: Pure Genius.

With seven CDs, one DVD, and the content and images for an 80-page book in hand, Rhino turned to Shorewood Packaging, a business of International Paper and a leading entertainment packaging company, to create and produce the packaging. "A great deal of philosophical, aesthetic, and thematic thought goes into collector's edition packaging," says Dan Davis, director of package design and development for Home Entertainment at Shorewood. "You need to look at the artist, the context in which they were working, and the era in which they were working."

Numerous discussions and brainstorming sessions led Shorewood to a packaging solution that both embraced the era and was emblematic of the '50s—a portable record player. The specialty packaging team at Shorewood developed a complete packaging idea through detailed renderings which they then presented to Rhino. They decided to actually re-create a record player of that time, constructing a package with materials both inside and outside that were consistent with the era.

"Portable record players are what the original recordings would have been played on," says Davis, "so we said to ourselves: ’ÄòHey, let's take a crack at making it look like the Real McCoy.'" Shorewood used FiberMark's Shadow by Corvon¬Æ to mimic the mustard-colored original covering of that era's record players. The Shadow material reproduces both a similar appearance and a similar tactile experience to the original.

"One of the great benefits of FiberMark materials is that they are built to last," says Brit Davis, the Shorewood account executive who spearheaded the project. "You don't need to add any coatings or additional production steps to make them stronger for the kind of continual reuse that collector's editions are subjected to."

The curvilinear injection molded plastic of the handle was custom made to match the color and finish of Charles' trademark Ray-Ban sunglasses, and real metal hinges were used for the lid and handle. More period-specific delights ensue upon opening the package. The backside of the lid features a sepia-toned recreation of operating instructions, replete with illustrations and text faithful to the spirit and customs of the era.

The inner lid expertly replicates a portable record player's turntable, stylus, volume controls, and dials, sporting a 45 rpm record of "Mess Around" by Ray Charles and his Orchestra. The image is printed on a styrene plastic substrate and then brought to realistic, 3D life through deep-draw vacuum molding.

Upon lifting the turntable, the consumer is greeted with a handsomely bound linen coffee table book with embossing that matches that on the package's cover. Snugly housed beneath the book, in a black velvet-draped waterfall holder, are the seven CDs and one DVD, each sheathed in custom Digipaks with Pantone earth tones.

The project could be subtitled "An Education in Collector's Edition Packaging" due to the inclusion of numerous and diverse substrates and components, structural design precision, and the communication and collaboration needed to construct such a complex package. When all the elements came together in the Waterbury, CT, plant for final assembly, there were eight different stops on the line. In the end, the package succeeds in capturing the ineffable, magical beauty of the man and his groundbreaking work in the middle of last century.