Cubitts
Hello hello,
It’s a long one this month, so stuff the preamble. We’re looking at one of my actual favourite brands in the world: Cubitts:
Who dem?
Cubitts are ‘modern spectacle makers’. Their frames have a strong modernist vibe. They’re beautifully designed, incredibly good quality with absurd attention to detail and a fanatical following among the spectacle cognoscenti
And! Somehow these beautifully designed, thoughtfully made, boutique-stored spectacles are also more affordable than yer average pair of designer frames from a high street optician. Perhaps we can have nice things after all.
All of which waxing lyrical is in part to say – if ever there’s a brand that doesn’t really need words, it’s Cubitts. They could’ve just kept quiet and let the spectacles speak for themselves. Yet they didn’t. They made their voice an integral part of their brand. And it’s a voice that’s just as thoughtful and delightful as their spectacles.
First, there’s that word spectacles. Cubitts never say glasses and never abbreviate to specs. It’s spectacles, in full, every time. It’s slightly old-fashioned
, slightly mannered, slightly fastidious. (It’s those hard consonants: speC-Ta-Cles – it’s a word one has to enunciate clearly.) Those three unslurrable syllables have the effect of just slightly slowing the pace of every sentence in which they’re used. That calmness is also echoed in this phrase that they use regularly: ‘buy rarely, repair when required.’ Those repeating Rs reinforcing in rhythm the unhurried directive. (See how I tried to do it myself there? It’s HARD, innit?)Back to their old skool vibe. Cubitts play with this beautifully. This little nugget from their ‘Contact Us’ info captures the essence of it:
I love how it’s both overly-precise (‘elegantly-designed yet upbeat and lively’) and intriguingly vague (‘group of people’). There’s something pleasingly ‘secret club’ about it
.This enigmatic world-building explodes on their Instagram. Sometimes it’s daft nonsense – like this made-up history ‘fact’ and accompanying dubious Latin riff:
Sometimes it’s hinting at the existence of a whole alternative reality. Ah yes, the International Spectacle Community’s old Rule 35. The bit about the frames being made from human hair is true, by the way. They also tried potatoes. (Oh, and that phrase ‘luckily imagination and play are regenerative’ – most brands would trumpet that as a ‘strategic insight’ and base an entire campaign around it. For Cubitts, it’s just a casual aside.)
Sometimes it’s pondering their possible wearers. (Super-flattering
to imagine oneself among this esteemed company). Also – AUBREY BEARDSLEY IN ONE OF HIS *MOODS* 🔥. I think about that line a lot.
They have this clubbish way of including us in their world. Notice that here they don’t say ‘As the artist and Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers wrote…’ . It’s ‘As Josef Albers once remarked…’ Like they were there when he said it – and we could easily have been, too.
Even when they’re talking about something as prosaic as getting regular eye tests, they do it with an offhand wit that feels like the sort of thing P G Wodehouse would have said when popping into the chemist:
It all has the feel of clever people with impeccable taste being effortlessly urbane. (Which, I am sure, is exactly what it’s like at Cubitts HQ.) In this respect, it weaves a similar magic to the editorial voice of publications like Private Eye, old Punch magazine or BBC Radio 4’s ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’. We might not get all the references and in-jokes, but we enjoy being around them all the same.
Related: Cubitts are also really good at poetry. And brand poetry is really hard to do well. (Just ask Network Rail). There’s frequent dashes of Edward Lear-eque bits of whimsy – such as this label on their recycled frames range:
Then occasionally they go all out. Issue Eight of their journal Spectacle contains An Ode to The Standard Deviation by Thomas Sharp (‘A poem celebrating the minuscule differences that make your face magnificent’). The same issue also contains a disquisition on noses and an interview with Errin Hussey of the Henry Moore Institute, on the ‘fascination with the human head and its legacy in sculpture. You don’t get this shit at SpecSavers. You start to realise that Cubitts’ voice isn’t like an ‘editorial voice’, it is one.
I could go on…
Right. Substack is telling me that this newsletter is already ‘nearly too long’. Rude. So let’s have a quick-fire round. Other ways Cubitts’ smart-thoughtfulness manifests include their steadfast unsalesyness. Here’s them ever-so-gently broaching optional upgrades to your lenses:
Then there’s the way they approach the words they use around recycling and re-use. Cubitts’ take is to talk about being an ‘infrequent shopper’, and draw our attention to how they deliberately don’t say ‘sustainability’, but ‘redux’:
I’m not wild about the word ‘redux’ (it sounds a bit too fancy for such a down-to-earth idea) – but I love how carefully they’re weighing their words. As with everything else, they want it to be just right.
And finally – gotta stop sometime – they have a really excellent way of explaining technical stuff. Here’s how they talk about the equipment they use in eye tests:
The standard advice would be to leave out or translate your industry jargon. Yet here’s Cubitts talking about ‘fundus photographs’ and ‘Enhanced Optical Coherence Tomography’! It works because they balance it with exactly the right amount of helpful interpretation. (‘thriving eyes, in other words’; ‘that’s mapping and measuring all ten layers of your eye’.) Every time one might think it’s getting a bit much, the Cubitts voice pops up again to reassure us: we’re here. We said this deliberately. It’s worth knowing.
(I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this. Come for the niche mid-century laffs, stay for the ophthalmoscopic documentation, eh.)
🔥 Three things to love, and from which to learn:
I had a long and lovely chat with Thomas Sharp
💬 What space opens up when you don’t force the selling.
Cubitts’ success is built on long-term brand-building, not short-term sales-pushing. This manifests in many ways – not least their approach to repair and re-use. It also means their writing never has to do a last-minute handbrake turn to include a salesy tagline. It allows a quieter, more thoughtful tone to develop. In many ways, sales messages are like joke punch-lines: everything else tends to get orientated around landing them perfectly.🤫 What don’t you need to say? So what are you free to do instead?
Thomas said that he started getting playful on Instagram because writing descriptions of the spectacles was completely redundant – there was already a beautiful photograph of them. Most brands would have just babbled on anyway and blamed the template. (‘Oh we had to repeat ourselves because there’s a box in the template needs filling’). Rubbish. It’s an opportunity to say something else. And of course, a real tone of voice isn’t just about style, it offers possibilities for what else to say when you’ve run out of small-talk. (See also: Palace Skateboards).🪐 Can you build a bigger world – and a smaller one – at the same time?
We all know that the best brands create tribes, feel like clubs etc. Cubitts take this a step further by conjuring up both a grand backdrop – international organisations with obscure rules; historical events that didn’t happen; wild characters who don’t exist – and an almost private language of references at the same time. (Mood: Aubrey Beardsley). Does your brand have a mythological space it can conjure up? A private language it could speak?
Just time to finish by saying Tone Knob has turned one-year old! 🎂 🙌 Thanks so much for hanging out. If you’re new here, maybe check out some early editions: Lemon.io’s swords & sorcery & recruitment voice. Unchained’s scientific-surfer-dudes voice. Or last Christmas’s heart-melting second-hand-cuddly-toys-made-outta-stories, Loved Before.
That’s all, folks
. What do you think? Hit reply. Know a brand you think I should feature? Hit reply. Just wanna say hi? Hit reply. Really like hitting reply? HIT REPLY. 👋Is there actually a spectacle cognoscenti? I don’t know, but I read the phrase in another piece about Cubitts and it really tickled me.
British brands that use knowingly old-fashioned vocabulary are always treading a fine line. Say you had a retro-vibe cycle brand. Going for ‘bicycle’ instead of ‘bike’ would be a nice touch. But insisting on ‘velocipede’ would tip you into faux Victoriana territory. Needless to say, Cubitts are always pitch-perfect on this balance. See also how they call their irl stores the ‘real three-dimensional world’. Nice.
It also kinda reminds me of the line from TS Eliot’s ‘Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – ‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.’ But that’s probably taking a bit of micro-copy too far.
Taking of ‘flattering’ – Cubitts Christmas campaign is a series of bon mots about the fine character of the ‘spectacle-gifter’: ‘The spectacle gifter writes impeccable and timely thank you cards’; ‘The spectacle gifter is capable of performing complex tasks while holding an umbrella’ etc.
Thomas Sharp is one of the most interesting people working with brands today. He’s a writer, creative director and poet who divides his time between commercial and personal work, which he often releases as small-run books and pamphlets (or art installations). I’d long wondered whether he might be working with Cubitts – though he was very clear that the Cubitts tone was established long before he was on the scene, and will continue long after he departs. You might recognise Thomas’s ‘research’ piece for the British Library. (It was one of eight D&AD Awards he bagged in 2020). His Substack, The Poetry Of It All, is one of my favourites.
Sharp recommended G K Chesterton’s slim collection The Club of Queer Trades. Each story centres on a person making their living in a novel or extraordinary way. (Rules of admittance are two-fold: you must have invented your strange job yourself, and it must be your main source of income.) And now, I commend it to you.
Apologies to those of you who find the footnotes a tiresome affectation. Things appear to have got particularly (spectacularly? sorry) out of control in this episode.