Francis Barraud’s dog, a gramophone horn and a record company’s trademark.

The letters HMV stand for His Master’s Voice, the title of a painting before they were the name of a shop. English Wikipedia says the artist Francis Barraud painted the picture in 1898, showing his late dog, Nipper, listening to a phonograph. The Guardian, in a short history of the chain published on 5 February 2019, described Nipper as a jack russell and said the cylinder phonograph in the original picture was later updated to a wind-up gramophone and eventually used as a simple silhouette.

The change of machine came with the sale of the picture. English Wikipedia’s article on the trademark says Barraud had tried to sell the painting to cylinder phonograph companies without success, and that William Barry Owen, the American founder of the Gramophone Company in England, offered to buy it on condition that Barraud repaint the machine as one of the company’s disc gramophones. Barraud did so, and the image appeared on the company’s catalogue from December 1899 and then on its gramophones. In 1909 the company put the dog and gramophone on its record labels, replacing an earlier recording-angel trademark, and it soon became known by the phrase printed around the top of the label, His Master’s Voice.

The picture travelled further than the company. Wikipedia says the inventor Emile Berliner registered the image as a trademark in the United States in July 1900, and that the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey, the American affiliate of the Gramophone Company, used it from 1901; Victor’s phonograph name is carried today by Victrola. In Germany, the Gramophone Company’s former subsidiary Deutsche Grammophon kept the trademark until 1949, the same article says. The splits followed the shop abroad: English Wikipedia says that when EMI took HMV abroad from the mid-1980s it could not use the His Master’s Voice name or the dog in the United States, Canada or Japan, though it was allowed to use the initials HMV on their own.

An Oxford Street shop opened by Edward Elgar, a fire, a rebuilding and a London chain.

The shop itself opened in London in the summer of 1921. A report from The Guardian’s London correspondent, dated 21 July 1921 and reprinted by the paper from its archive on 15 January 2013, described the opening of the Gramophone Company’s “fine new headquarters” in Oxford Street that day, with the composer Sir Edward Elgar performing the opening. Elgar, the report said, spoke about the gramophone’s artistic mission, and the correspondent called the building “an interesting example of the super-shop of to-day”, adding that it would house a school for shop assistants. The Guardian’s 2019 history gives the opening date as 20 July 1921 and says Elgar cut the ribbons strung across the doors; English Wikipedia says the shop took over a former men’s clothing shop.

The building was rebuilt once. English Wikipedia says the original shop was badly damaged by fire in 1937 and reopened on 8 May 1939, when the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham opened the new shop. By then the Gramophone Company had merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1931 to form EMI.

For decades HMV was mostly one address. The Guardian wrote in 2019 that in its early decades the business traded principally from the Oxford Street store, spread across London in the 1950s and 1960s and became a national chain in the 1980s. English Wikipedia dates the start of the London expansion to 1966 and says that in 1986 the chain opened a new flagship elsewhere on Oxford Street, which it ran until 14 January 2014. The Guardian’s history names Kate Bush, David Bowie and Amy Winehouse among artists who appeared in HMV stores, and the BBC mentioned a 1995 rooftop gig by Blur at the Oxford Street store. In 1998 EMI divested the retail business, which became HMV Media Group and floated as HMV Group plc in 2002, and in June 2003 EMI transferred the His Master’s Voice trademark itself to the retailer, Wikipedia says.

A dog, a horn and three letters that can travel without the picture.

A record shop’s identity is carried less by a logo on a screen than by the objects that pass across its counter. The carrier bag is the object many customers keep: a printed bag sized for a twelve-inch sleeve leaves the shop under an arm, travels on buses and ends up in wardrobes holding records for years, so the mark on it does the work that a billboard does for other retailers. Inside, the browser bins set the grammar of the room. Dividers and genre cards, often cut from card and lettered by hand or with a stencil, tell a visitor where reggae ends and soul begins, and their lettering becomes as familiar as the sign above the door. Price stickers work as small typography too, with their colours, codes and handwriting telling regulars how a shop sorts new and used stock.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from events. In-store gigs bring posters, flyers, wristbands and listings boards, and a shop that books bands into local halls and churches builds a printed calendar around its name. Some shops run their own record labels, so their name also appears on sleeves, centre labels and catalogue numbers, where it reaches listeners who have never been through the door. Record Store Day adds a yearly set of exclusive releases, queues and window displays, and shops often make their own posters and bags for the day. Taken together, the bag, the bin card, the sticker and the gig poster give a shop a recognisable look that is built from use rather than from a single brand book.

Hilco, Sunrise Records and returns to the 1921 Oxford Street site.

The chain has changed hands twice since 2013. The restructuring firm Hilco owned HMV from 2013, and in October 2013 moved the flagship back to the 1921 Oxford Street site, as The Guardian noted in 2019. After a second administration in December 2018, the Canadian record-shop chain Sunrise Records, run by Doug Putman, bought the business, which The Guardian reported on 5 February 2019; the Oxford Street shop was among the stores that closed that day. English Wikipedia adds a distinction: Sunrise operates the shops, while the HMV and His Master’s Voice trademarks in the UK and several other territories are recorded to Mermaid (Brands) Limited, a Hilco company. In Japan, Wikipedia says, HMV belongs to the convenience-store group Lawson, and because JVC Kenwood controls the His Master’s Voice mark there, HMV Japan uses a stylised gramophone of its own design.

Under Sunrise the name has been refreshed. English Wikipedia says HMV opened the HMV Vault in Birmingham in October 2019, marked its 100th birthday in July 2021 with limited-edition vinyl releases and a compilation called Now That’s What I Call HMV, and from October 2021 began using “The HMV Shop” on shopfronts and social media while keeping the previous logo in most shops. The BBC reported on 28 April 2023 that the Oxford Street site would reopen under a new format called HMV Shop, with different branding and a new layout, after a four-year absence. Metro, on 12 October 2026, reported that members of the band Madness opened the shutters at the reopening in November 2023, and that the company planned to close the shop again in March 2027 while it looked for a new site in London’s West End. Phil Halliday, HMV’s managing director, told the paper: “This is a special store. It’s where we began 100 years ago.” Wikipedia also records a return to Ireland in 2023 and openings in Belgium and the Netherlands.

The dog does not travel everywhere. English Wikipedia notes that the former Canadian flagship on Toronto’s Yonge Street carried the HMV fascia without Nipper, because the image belongs to a different company in Canada, and that HMV’s former Hong Kong shops switched from a gramophone mark to the dog without the gramophone.

For a design guide, HMV shows how a retailer can carry a painting’s title as three letters, keep the picture where it holds the rights and let the initials work alone where it does not. Compare Victrola, a name from Victor, the American company that put Nipper on its machines, and Deutsche Grammophon, the former German arm of the Gramophone Company. For this guide we use plum, horn brass and label cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HMV’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.