JDS Labs

Our rela­tion­ship with JDS Labs began all the way back in 2014. At that time, Fer­al was nowhere near the gar­gan­tu­an multi­na­tion­al jug­ger­naut it is today. It was me in my bed­room, work­ing away on a lethar­gic Gate­way desk­top I bought for $400 to start my design career when I had no mon­ey. Mean­while, JDS was a tiny com­pa­ny with just a hand­ful of head­phone ampli­fiers based on crowd-sourced designs. To give you an idea, one of the most pop­u­lar prod­ucts was built in an Altoids tin. 

Long sto­ry short, their web devel­op­er had recent­ly dis­ap­peared some­where in the Flori­da ever­glades and JDS need­ed help. I was quick to vol­un­teer, and with the help of Jor­dan Sow­ers, a design­er friend who is now too famous to answer any of my texts, we redesigned the JDS site into the first ver­sion of what it is today. That site boost­ed sales imme­di­ate­ly and JDS con­tin­ued to grow. 
 

With suc­cess comes respon­si­bil­i­ty, and with­in a few short years Fer­al proud­ly han­dled all of JDS Labs’ cre­ative work. This includ­ed the indus­tri­al design project for their flag­ship project, The Ele­ment. Designed by the incred­i­ble Elie Ahovi, The Ele­ment was an instant hit in the audio­phile com­mu­ni­ty. It’s sim­ple, mono­lith­ic design lan­guage made it a dar­ling on desks across the world. 

Since then, Fer­al has worked close­ly with JDS as both com­pa­nies have grown in size and stature. Begin­ning in 2018, we com­plete­ly rebuilt their web­site after JDS out­grew its home­grown ERP, ship­ping, and ecom­merce plat­form. Our bespoke Djan­go app now allows for JDS to seam­less­ly man­age their online store­front, inven­to­ry, and ship­ping. While we were at it, we updat­ed the site design too and added con­tent con­trol. This effort took the bet­ter part of a year — it def­i­nite­ly felt like it — but the results speak for them­selves. JDS has set sales records each of the last 3 years and now leads the indus­try in head­phone ampli­fiers sold.