Who is Craig Braun?

 Though being born in 1939 to very working-class parents in Chicago, Braun would go on to achieve incredible success in his working life (even going as far as to boast one of the world’s rarest vintage Porsche collections). Growing up, he always had a sustained interest in the music and film industries.

It was this intrigue that would secure him a job as a record die cutter and printer in the mid-1960s. It was during that career that Braun would go on to change the way the world looked at vinyl records, and specifically their covers and artwork, forever.

 

Before the mid-1960s sealed records were totally plain - no company or artist advertising, no hype stickers, nothing. Records were shrink-wrapped in clear plastic and that was the extent of their packaging. Braun wanted to change that.

He has described how he one day whilst working on a different project, “came up with a gimmick, which was a self-adhesive label for albums emblazoned with ‘includes the hit single’…”. So, fresh out of university, Braun landed a job in New York for a local printing firm and started developing his adhesive album stickers.

 

Above: a modern release featuring a green hype sticker.

“If you had a sticker on the upper third of an LP’s shrink-wrap, it sold a lot more albums”, Braun told LongLiveVinyl. It was after that realisation that he began taking his label designs to various record companies across the USA. Braun would eventually go on to start his own brokering business and would hire designers and illustrators to provide artwork for things like store banners, point-of-sale displays and store counter units – if it had anything to do with merchandising within the music industry, Craig Braun would have lent his name to it.

Braun recounts how he received a call from London Records (who had offices across the USA) to produce a 12” album cover for them. “I didn’t have a background in album design, but without hesitation said yes before I even knew what to do”. Braun mentions how he “saw that there was an opportunity to take the conventional format of a 12”x12” album away from the ordinary”, and that is exactly what he did.

Braun went on to build a friendship with famous visual artist Andy Warhol, and the pair would go on to design iconic album covers such as ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’, ‘Led Zeppelin III’, and of course, ‘Sticky Fingers’ by the Rolling Stones.

Click here to read our deep-dive into the Sticky Fingers artwork.

It was also Braun who manufactured the iconic Rolling Stones logo. He had always admitted that it was actually local art student John Pasche that conceived the idea with assistance from the band members, although when it came time to submit designs for the cover, Pasche’s wasn’t complete - so Braun stepped in and told the band’s record label WEA to use the student’s design on the UK release of their next album, giving Pasche the time needed to finish his design. “Ultimately, it ended up being my version, not his, that they use everywhere.” Braun mentions how Pasche was paid nearly £100,000 for his version of the design, even though it isn’t used on any of the Stones’ promotional material to date.

 

Braun later dabbled in the music video industry, where he created his own company alongside director Albert Fisher. In the mid-1980s, he joined up with record label WEA again (having worked with them previously) to become head of their marketing department. He was hired specifically to ‘design special edition CDs’ for the company, which Braun referenced as being ‘more design focused’ and ‘fun’ compared to running his own business.

 
Above: a WEA company sleeve

In his later years, Braun became a member of The Actor’s Studio and has credits in many projects within TV, film, and theatre. He has even appeared in films as recently as 2021 at the age of 82. Now nearly 84, Braun is living in Manhattan, New York, and although it is not clear if he has any more creative works planned for the near future, it is certain that he has contributed his fair share to the entertainment industry during his nearly six-decade career.