The Beats By Dre Meeting

Hey Everyone! welcome back to episode 6 of the journey!

In the last episode - the turnaround - I talked about how we plan to turn Wicked Cushions around and make it bigger than ever before while dealing with the challenges from the past year.  

I promised you at the end that I will tell you about the coolest thing that has happened to me because of Wicked Cushion(Up until the next coolest event of course). So here we go:

It was the end of 2017, we were growing rapidly & the awareness of replacement ear pads (Mainly Beats By dre) was extremely low. But we were doing a lot to try and tell the world that they exist.

At that time, the only designs we had were the florals & red camo.

It was 6 pm when suddenly I received an email to my inbox. The email address ended with @apple.com, it was from a guy named Alex who presented himself as a Beats By Dre employee.

My heart was beating EXTREMELY FAST, and before I continued to read the rest of the email I thought everything was over.

I thought “this is it..” Beats are not happy with what I do, this is probably the end of Wicked Cushions as I know it, they are probably going to tell me to stop or even worse - Sue me.

I gathered myself and kept reading.

Have you ever worried & made up a huge story in your mind for no freaking reason?

That is exactly what I did. This was the actual content of his email:

"A couple of weeks ago I ordered some floral and camo ear pads from your company. After installing the ear pads onto our product, we are interested in exploring further customization."


MY JAW DROPPED

Someone from Beats By Dre ordered OUR product?! Are you kidding me?

I probably spent 30 minutes researching whether someone can fake an email that ends with @apple.com, I could not believe what I was reading, I thought that someone is for sure out here trying to scam me.

After some research, I found out that this email was LEGIT.


Long story short, me and Alex exchanged some emails back and forth regarding our product & they had wanted me to create a specific design.

Several weeks later, that design was ready and I was invited to the Beats By Dre headquarters to present it to them.

I have never felt prouder in my entire life, this little company I created 2 years before, brought me to the headquarters of a subsidiary of one the biggest companies in the world (Apple).

The offices were as cool as I imagined, you can look at their new offices built in 2014 here :

https://www.officelovin.com/2014/07/29/beats-dr-dres-new-headquarters/

Regarding the actual meeting - it went meh...

I did get to see some cool stuff before everyone else like the customized Philadelphia eagles beats Studio 3 that they made before Superbowl 52.

Besides that, I felt that there was nothing that they really wanted to do with the design I made, there was no clear goal or plan for my meeting. Beyond talking about my design, they asked me about whether I can make custom colors that they do not make (specifically purple).

I got out of the meeting a little confused & the communication between me and Alex slowly stopped while I was working on trying to create a purple ear pad for them.


In the end, the only thing that came out of that meeting was our inspiration for the design you know today as Geo Grey - which is a slight variation of the design beats by dre requested that I make.

Regarding that purple ear pad?

nothing came out of it, but about a year later I finally understood why they had asked me whether that could be done - introducing "Beats Pop"  collection.



Regardless, it was still a very cool experience and I am grateful that it happened.

And that is it for today's episode. I will see you on the next one
Meanwhile, Stay Wicked my friends.