This pretty display turns your old CD cases into art

Remember CDs? There’s a new company betting that, if you don’t already, you’re about to.

Jewel is a Norwegian company specializing in manufacturing high-end display cases for CDs. The brand recently soft-launched online in Europe and is planning to expand to the U.S. in the coming months. It offers products that range from an $130 freestanding case that fits four CDs to a $300, 16-slot case designed to be mounted directly onto the wall.

Launching a CD-based brand more than 20 years after CDs hit their peak feels like a counterintuitive prospect. After all, how many people even own a CD player these days? But Marius Brandl, Jewel’s founder, says the brand’s thesis is simple: Vinyl records have had their renaissance. CDs are next. 

Are CDs on the rise?

Retro tech and physical media have experienced an undeniable comeback, in part driven by young consumers looking to cut back on social media. Gadgets like iPods (yes, those are considered retro), Game Boys, film cameras, and even pagers have seen a resurgence.

And, as Brandl notes, that applies to the music industry, too. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), vinyl posted its 18th straight year of growth in 2024, generating $1.4 billion in retail revenue, its highest share of physical format revenue since 1984. 

Meanwhile, CDs may have fallen out of fashion in the mid-2000s, but they’re not a dead medium. In 2024, the RIAA reports, 33 million CDs were sold in the U.S., up 1.5% from 2023.

For some fanbases, they’re becoming a more popular collector’s item: Taylor Swift, for example, has a longstanding partnership with Target and tends to sell several versions of her albums in the format, including the upcoming Life of a Showgirl album, which will include three exclusive CDs. Charli XCX also gave the CD an injection of instant cool last summer, when her brat CDs sold out almost instantly.

“What’s interesting is the generation born before and after the year 2000, especially in Europe, have really, really been collecting [CDs],” Brandl says. “My feeling is that CDs will have a comeback.”

The making of a CD brand in 2025

Brandl’s idea for Jewel—a brand name inspired by the plastic “jewel case” that most CDs come in—actually started back in the ‘90s, when he was in college. Brandl remembers attending a party where he saw a table strewn in CDs, and wondering to himself whether there might be a better way to organize and display them.

At the time, Brandl’s concept of a grid-based display case received lots of positive feedback from his professors, who saw the CD as a promising new medium. He only made it to early development stages, though, before realizing that he couldn’t find a way to both display the CDs and open their cases without damaging them, and the idea fizzled out.

When Brandl’s close friend convinced him to revive the idea in 2023, Brandl spent more than half a year developing the right blend of rubber to hold each jewel case inside his display prototype. The rubber, which lines two sides of each square-shaped slot, needed enough grip to keep the cases from sliding, but not so much that the cases would break when opened.

“The rubber was the biggest challenge, and also how to be able to make it not to be too expensive to produce,” Brandl says. He adds that the acrylic, aluminum, and hardware that serve as the backbone of the displays are all premium materials sourced from European manufacturers, which has bumped up the brand’s price points.

“Instead of making it as cheap as possible with cheap materials, we thought, ‘The ones who will buy this are probably the ones who like music so much that they have a nice Hi-Fi system, and they want new design solutions.’”

Given that Jewel just launched, Brandl says it’s difficult to measure sales numbers at this stage. From inside his street-level office in Oslo, though, he talks with interested customers every day who stop by to take a closer look at the product. 

“The people are from eight, nine yearsold to 82 years old,” Brandl says. “I think the ones between 17 and 25 show the most interest. And I tell them, ‘Your parents and grandparents and great grandparents listen to LPs. But the CD—that’s your generation’s physical connection to music.’”

View the full article