It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a… Schücophone? What’s a Schücophone? Well, Schüco just so happens to be one of the largest suppliers of building materials (see window and facade frames) in the world and they wanted a 360 sonic identity that really embodied the true sense of the brand. What better way to embody the true sense of a brand than by making music with their actual products. But you might be thinking “a window frame isn’t an instrument”. And you would've been right, until the Schücophone came along.

After that first riveting paragraph, you must all be intrigued to finally find out what this Schücophone is all about. Well let’s start from the beginning. The corporate branding experts at Peter Schmidt Group set us the task of creating a melody based on Schüco’s core brand values. This was achieved by identifying specific notes for each of these key terms.

The ground note for strong.
The fifth for simple.
The third for client-oriented.
The fourth for sophisticated.
The seventh for innovative.

But it would’ve been a bit boring playing this lovely melody on a normal instrument. So we took the train to Bielefeld and spent a couple of days walking around Schüco’s headquarters, recording anything that produced sound of some kind. We took these sounds, along with a few building materials, back to Hamburg and put our thinking caps on. Just what could we do with all of our findings?

The result was (ok, you’ve probably guessed it by now) the Schücophone. Built together with instrument designer Nic Baginsky, the Schücophone is built entirely from aluminum window frames, custom-tuned to be able to play the 4 notes of the Schüco sound logo, along with the heart of the Schüco brand sound, the Schüco Pulse. It’s basically the biggest Xylophone ever built (we’ve not actually looked into this, but it’s definitely quite large). A percussive instrument, the Schüco Cascade, was also developed to add another layer of schüconess to the brand’s sound. Everyone loved the results, which is why you can hear the Schücophone and sound logo on TV ads, apps, ringtones, factory gongs, hold music, door bells and even once as a live performance for the presentation of the new sonic identity at “Schüco Day”. Oh, and it even won a bunch of awards!