VINYL ME, PARTON
A year-long Dolly Parton vinyl subscription. Twelve records, shipping April 2023 through March 2024. The page went live in January 2023 and is no longer on the internet. This is a reconstruction from the original design files.
I was Senior Director, Head of Product and Design at Vinyl Me, Please from 2018 to 2024. This was a company-wide initiative with a lot of people in it, from curation to packaging to marketing to the digital membership experience. My part was working out what a year-long subscription built entirely around one artist would even be. The company had never done anything like it, so it started from nothing, and it got built out of the platform we already had with the executive team and the engineering team.
- UX Direction
- Creative Direction
- Customer Experience
Campaign film © Vinyl Me, Please, 2023. I did not make it.
Dolly was in this one.
Her team chose the twelve albums, and told us why each one was special and why they wanted our members to hear it. She made videos for Vinyl Me, Please talking through them. Every record was exclusively packaged, and every quarter something turned up that was not a record at all.
It meant a lot to the people who made it and to the people who received it. Owning them means something different now.
“I love listening to records, and to know that fans around the world are discovering music on vinyl is wonderful.”
The first three of the twelve: My Tennessee Mountain Home, Little Sparrow and Blue Smoke.
The quarterly surprise: Listen To More Dolly Parton socks, a star slipmat, a butterfly bandana and a record divider. Photograph by A to Z Media, who pressed the run.
The front door of the experience, not the marketing for it.
The page had one job: explain a subscription that behaved differently from every other one we sold. Members normally choose a track and swap the records they do not want. This one you could not swap. You were committing to all twelve, in order, for a year.
So the page is built as a road. The records run 1973, then 2001, then 2014, then 1968, which looks wrong until you read the months underneath: the run was ordered by what shipped when, not by when the albums came out.
I did not draw this page. A contract UX designer I managed did, and I directed it.
Not a recording of the old site, which is gone. The page rebuilt in HTML from the original XD documents and a capture of the live one, then recorded at a reading pace. Every mockup was flattened art, so each record was split back into its sleeve and its disc, which is why the vinyl turns. The buttons are reproduced as designed; none of them do anything.
She died while I was going back through old work. Everything was still on a drive, so I put it back together.
Concept, creative and UX direction. Leigh Buck, Sr. Director, Head of Product and Design.
A contract UX designer I managed and directed. NAME NEEDED.
Chosen by Dolly Parton and her team, who told us why each one mattered.
Artwork, films and marks © Vinyl Me, Please / Offbeat Ventures, LLC. Album art © respective rights holders.