Sonos announces five new colors for its AirPlay 2-enabled One speaker

Sonos One limited edition

One week after announcing a new limited edition Beastie Boys Play:5 speaker, Sonos is back with a host of new colors for the Sonos One. Today’s news arrives as part of a collaboration between the popular speaker brand and designer HAY. There’s more competition than ever in the smart speaker market, so it’s no surprise that Sonos is going this route with new colorways. After all, we’ve seen them do it before. More info on the Sonos One limited edition colors below.

Sonos One limited edition colors

This morning, we’re getting new Sonos One limited edition colors thanks to a partnership with designer group HAY. This brings the total number of Sonos One colors to seven, joining the previously-released white and black casings.

“Color is like food or smell,” says Tad Toulis, Vice President of Design at Sonos. “It’s a great vehicle for invoking memory, and it’s so different to different people.” So why, you may wonder, doesn’t Sonos typically use color when designing speakers?

HAY colors and more expensive Sonos One

Every year HAY unveils a selection of the year’s hottest colors, and each of today’s Sonos One limited edition colors come from that selection. Today’s new colors include yellow, green, red, pink, and grey. All of them will be available on November 5th at a slight markup of $229. The standard Sonos One sells at most online retailers for $199.

Sonos will be offering its new limited edition model of the One speaker at its Sonos Store in Manhattan, along with the MoMA design store and Sonos direct online. You won’t find these latest models available at Amazon or Best Buy.

Sonos more affordable than ever with more discounts coming

Sonos speakers have seen some notable markdowns in recent months, and more discounts are on the way with Black Friday around the corner. Currently the lineup starts at $149 with the Play:1 and goes up from there. You can expect to see prices drop to around $120 in November for the holidays. Of course, you’ll want to keep it locked to 9to5Toys throughout the holiday shopping season for all of the best deals.

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Our collaboration with Danish furnishings brand HAY gives the Sonos One smart speaker the kind of enhancement you won’t find in a software update: Five new colors hand-selected from HAY’s 2018 palette.

“Color is like food or smell,” says Tad Toulis, Vice President of Design at Sonos. “It’s a great vehicle for invoking memory, and it’s so different to different people.” So why, you may wonder, doesn’t Sonos typically use color when designing speakers?

“I would argue black and white are colors,” Toulis laughs. “We decided to use color as a way of making these monolithic statements. When something is all white or all black, it stops seeming like an assembled object and is instead like a ceramic piece you may have in your home. We want to make really simple objects that blend in with your life and don’t claim too much attention.”

To go beyond black and white and explore the relationship between sound and color in home design, Sonos teamed up with the revered Danish home furnishings brand HAY. Using HAY’s distinctive 2018 color palette, we began to explore how we might infuse one of our speakers with colors that could fit beautifully—yet subtly–into people’s homes. But while adding color to a speaker may sound simple, the process has its own complexities.

“Matching all the metal and plastic parts of a speaker requires a lot of experimenting and adjustments,” Toulis says. “You have different materials, different paint application processes, even different paint methodologies and chemistries. To make those parts all look the same requires a tremendous amount of work.”

All of that hard work proved fruitful in April 2018 when HAY and Sonos first announced the HAY Sonos One Limited Edition Collection at the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair in Milan, Italy. It was there that HAY cofounders Mette and Rolf Hay joined Sonos in offering the world its first look at the Sonos One in five colors selected by Mette Hay herself.

“For me color is one of the most important tools in the design process,” explains Mette Hay. “I believe each object has its own set of colors. I couldn’t use the same colors for a new chair as I could for a piece of porcelain, but they can still live together and look nice. When I started working on colors for Sonos I knew exactly what we needed.”

“We wanted to create colors that were for everyone,” explains Hay. “I select colors based on situations and how I see a product being used.”

“Each color needs to harmonize with a particular space,” she adds. “The yellow color was very inspired by kitchens and bathrooms where things can often be light colors, [made of materials like] stainless steel and porcelain.”

“For the green we wanted something like plants in the window frame, where you could also place the speaker and it could blend in,” she says. “With the light grey, it was important to find the right neutral tone, one that would work in both workspaces and homes. Pink is intended for the more fashionable person. All things pink create a special desire right now.”

Finally, there was Vivid Red, the last color selected for the collection. “It is such an important color for furniture, and we wanted an iconic red that would also fit well with our New Order shelf by Stefan Diez.”

Once the colors were finalized, the hard work of implementing them began. “We had to produce a plastic that was specific to these painted colors,” Toulis explains. “We couldn’t just paint on a white or black speaker.”

Drawing on Sonos and HAY’s shared heritage of sophisticated manufacturing, the team created the tools necessary to match the color of the materials. “We had to injection-mold colored resin to achieve the color. There was no other way to get to red, for example, from white or black,” Toulis says. “This is the intricacy and subtlety of color. It’s a combination of how the light hits it, the undercoat, and the technique.”

Once the different materials were color-matched, the team could assess how the speakers looked in different environments—not to mention alongside HAY’s products. The resulting collection reveals the merits of Mette Hay’s intuitive approach to design and how color can bring objects in the home to life.

“Working with color helps draw the user into looking at the object,” says Toulis. The challenge with the Sonos One is that it is designed to fade into the background, as evidenced by the smooth finish, understated form, flush buttons, and discrete LED light.

“It should just disappear,” Toulis says of the design of Sonos products. “But when you do stop to look at it, you should appreciate the detail and, in this case, the colors that you don’t normally see in electronics. We want you to notice things like the particular shade we picked or how well matched the parts are.”

“These speakers deserve to be treated like furniture,” says Hay. And like furniture, these functional accessories play a key role in defining the look and feel of a space—In this case, with the help of sound, an element that, because of its invisible nature, is often overlooked.

“Sound is definitely a sign of life in the home,” says Hay. This colorful collection brings that truth to the forefront with a whole new accent.

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