A record shop, a French punk band and a label, 1976–1978.

Rough Trade was a shop before it was a label. Wikipedia says Geoff Travis opened the original Rough Trade shop on 23 February 1976, on Kensington Park Road in the Ladbroke Grove district of West London, and that he reportedly took the name from the Canadian band Rough Trade. The shop, it says, specialised in garage rock and reggae.

Travis described the thinking himself. In a conversation with Johnny Marr published by The Guardian on 14 September 2009, he said he was inspired by the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, where readers could sit in the basement with the work of the Beat poets without being thrown out. He said he opened the shop in order to listen to music all day and to provide a “community-based environment” where people could discover music they might not find in a mainstream shop.

The label followed from a visit. Travis told The Guardian that starting a label seemed the right thing to do when a French group, Métal Urbain, came into the shop and asked for help with a track they had recorded. He named Chiswick Records and Stiff Records, neighbours already releasing records nearby, as the models that gave the team the feeling they could do the same. Wikipedia dates the label’s activities to 1978.

The early releases are documented one by one. Wikipedia says the label went on to issue a single by the Jamaican musician Augustus Pablo, the debut EP by the Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire and the Stiff Little Fingers single Alternative Ulster, and that during 1978 it released singles by the Monochrome Set, Subway Sect, Swell Maps and the Swiss group Kleenex. It lists the label’s debut album as Stiff Little Fingers’ Inflammable Material in 1979.

The business soon spread beyond one counter. Wikipedia says Rough Trade set up a distribution arm that served independent shops across Britain, a network that became known as the Cartel, and that the label signed the Smiths in 1983. The shop and the label had begun as one business under one name; within a few years they would start to separate.

A label rebuilt, an owner settled and a shop company apart.

Wikipedia says that in 1982 the shop and the label separated, and that the shop moved at the same time from Kensington Park Road round the corner to Talbot Road, where it still trades. It adds that a further London shop opened in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden, in 1988. The label, by Wikipedia’s account, ran into difficulties linked to its distribution arm in the late 1980s and went into receivership.

The label was rebuilt by two people. Wikipedia says Rough Trade Records was relaunched in 2000 as a partnership between Travis and Jeannette Lee, a former member of Public Image Ltd, with Sanctuary Records as a partner, and that it released the Strokes’ debut EP The Modern Age in the spring of 2001. In 2009 Travis told The Guardian that he and Lee run the label together and turn down acts that do not appeal to them.

The current ownership dates from 2007. Billboard reported on 24 July 2007 that Beggars Group had bought the stake in Rough Trade Records that it did not already own from Sanctuary, with immediate effect. The report said the label would keep operating from its offices on Golborne Road in London while Beggars took on central office functions, and that the Rough Trade retail chain was not part of the deal. Travis and Lee said in a statement that the label would continue as a wholly independent label with the support of the Beggars Group. Beggars Group has owned Rough Trade Records since 2007, with Travis and Lee still running it.

The shops took their own route. Stereogum, reporting on 25 November 2013, said that although they were once connected, Rough Trade the retail company and Rough Trade Records the label are separate companies today. Wikipedia says the shops’ holding company is jointly owned by XL Recordings, a Beggars Group label, and the French businessman Matthieu Pigasse, and that the retailer is headquartered in Nottingham and runs shops in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany alongside an online store.

The result is one name carried by two businesses with a shared history. On a record sleeve it means the label run by Travis and Lee; on a street sign it means the shop company. Both trace the name back to the same doorway off Ladbroke Grove in 1976.

Labels, spines and shops as brand surfaces.

A record label’s identity rarely lives in one place. It is spread across a series of small, repeated surfaces that a listener meets again and again: the logo printed on the centre label of a vinyl disc, the mark that sits at the top or bottom of a sleeve spine, the run of letters and numbers that make up a catalogue number, and the rule set that decides how a front cover is laid out. Seen one at a time these details are modest. Seen across a shelf of releases they become the brand.

Spines matter because records are usually stored edge-on. A consistent spine treatment — the same typeface, the same position for the logo, the same order for artist, title and catalogue number — lets a run of releases read as a set. Catalogue numbers do similar work: a prefix and a sequence turn a list of records into an archive that collectors can follow.

Some labels go further and give their sleeves a house style, built by a single designer or studio over many years. Others let each artist lead and keep the label’s presence to a small mark. Imprints, sub-labels, shops and mail-order operations extend the same identity into new places, from a carrier bag to a shop sign. In each guide below, the question is which of these surfaces a label has used, and how consistently.

Brick Lane, Brooklyn and the shop as a venue.

For Rough Trade, the shop itself is the main brand surface, and its recent shops are documented as buildings. Wikipedia says the chain began to grow again in July 2007, opening Rough Trade East in Dray Walk, a courtyard off Brick Lane in the former Truman’s Brewery in East London. It says the shop was designed by the architect David Adjaye, with a stage for gigs, a café and a seating area with computers and desks, and that every record on sale carried a written description to encourage browsing. Stereogum noted in 2013 that Rough Trade East had opened in 2007 as a companion to the small original storefront.

The model crossed the Atlantic six years later. Stereogum reported that Rough Trade NYC opened on 25 November 2013 on North 9th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after four years of planning. The shop was fitted into a former HBO prop warehouse, with a multi-level interior built from old shipping containers, a café run by the Greenpoint café Five Leaves, an installation gallery and a concert venue with a bar. Stephen Godfroy, described in the piece as a co-owner, said the company had a long-standing habit of opening shops away from the main shopping streets.

Those details define how the name is seen in public: a shopfront, a performance room and a counter where staff write about the records. The same store, Stereogum said, focused on new music with an emphasis on UK imports and planned a programme of ticketed concerts and in-store performances from its opening night.

The label side carries the name in a different way. Its releases are dated facts on Rough Trade’s own catalogue, from Métal Urbain and Cabaret Voltaire in the late 1970s to the Smiths in the 1980s and the Strokes’ The Modern Age in 2001. Travis told The Guardian in 2009 that the label’s criterion was simply that he and Lee had to love the music.

For a design guide, Rough Trade shows how a single name can work as the identity of a shop, a label and a distribution network, and keep its meaning even after the businesses behind it separate. Compare Sub Pop, another independent label that grew a strong local identity, and Warp Records, another British independent label. For this guide we use shopfront red, brick and pressing black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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