Guiding Principles
As a company, Arienne Audio is governed by a set of 4 guiding principles. These guiding principles inform every way we do business. Learning them is the best way to get to know us and how we function as a company.
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Principle #1:
Sound Design
Our products are designed in-house. Period. With the capsules, for example, the backplates are custom, the rings are custom (we own the molds), the film is slit, coated, brought to tension, and heat-treated just for our capsules. We even own the die for cutting the spacers. The screws are made from scratch. Every single part is custom, and every single part is individually and holistically evaluated for the design it’s being used in. That means no improperly-treated Mylar. No too-bendy plastic (a big pet peeve). No out-of-spec or adapted parts. That doesn't just apply to our capsules, either. It's true of everything we offer under our brand. The precise dimensions and properties of every single part are known and accounted for.
Principle #2:
Transparency
Running an honest and transparent business is very important to us. This has been part of our brand since day 1, ever since we posted about our first capsule project online, and we don't intend to change a thing about it.
Principle #3:
Courtesy
We strive to be courteous in every interaction. Of course, that means the basics—timely replies, no-questions-asked replacements with shipping paid both ways, and full after-sales support—but there's more to it than that. “Courtesy” doesn't just mean good customer service—or even simply “being nice”—but something a little deeper than that. It means designing products with a complete focus on user experience. It means, in our upcoming studio gear, easy-to-navigate hardware, with directions that are easy to understand, with knobs and switches of different textures and shapes so that you don't have to look down, press any buttons or navigate any menus to get to the function you're looking for. It means stamping Braille into the front panel of every one of our units, even if it takes a bit of extra time, and shipping every end-user retail product with dictated instruction recordings, in addition to traditional written manuals.
Principle #4:
Reliability
To be honest, this is the one we’ve struggled with the most. To ditch the corporate “royal we” stuff for a second: When I first started this business, I was in my 20s messing around with capsule designs. The popularity of my designs was a complete surprise, and very sudden. I was almost instantly buried in huge volumes of requests to buy them and, being a bit ‘green’ (new to business and not very assertive), I rushed in order to try to make people happy. This caused some reliability issues in a few of my early batches. Standing up for myself, giving reasonable estimates and learning when to say “No” have been difficult battles for me, and that’s exactly why I’m committing to Reliability as a core principle of my business. Reliability, above all, means taking a deep breath, taking a step back, saying “Wait,” and doing due diligence. It also means doing the best I can when something still slips through.
