Somewhere, right now, an algorithm is deciding what you'll hear next. It's good at it. It knows what you played yesterday, what people like you are playing, what will keep you listening. You never have to choose. That's the point — and that's what we wanted to push back against.
Because there's another way to hear music, and anyone who owns records knows it. You get up. You walk to the shelf. Your fingers move across the spines until one stops you. You slide the record from its sleeve, set it down, lower the needle, and wait for the crackle before the first note. You chose that. Nobody chose it for you. That small walk across the room is the whole difference. Streaming asks nothing of you. Vinyl asks for your presence — and gives it back as something you can't get any other way. You can't shuffle a feeling. You can't skip to the good part of an evening. A record plays at its own speed, side by side, and for forty minutes it sets the pace of the room instead of the other way around. In a world built to go faster, that's not a limitation. It's the reason.
Where it started
Groovaly began with a frustration most collectors will recognise. I couldn't see my own records. They were there — hundreds of them — but packed tight, spines unreadable, and the ones at the back might as well not have existed. I kept playing the same forty I could actually find. A collection I loved had quietly become furniture I ignored.
I looked for something to fix it and found nothing I wanted in my home. Storage units hide records by design: spine-out, edge to edge, the collection turned into a wall you stop seeing. That's the opposite of what a collection is for. A record you can't see is a record you'll never play.
So the idea was simple, and it became the line we build everything around:
Don’t Just Store. Explore.
Bloom
I drew the first designs with Franck Simon — a good friend, and a cabinetmaker with the patience I don't have. We were after one thing: a way to see the records, all of them, without pulling the shelf apart. It took a lot of failed drawers to get there. What we ended up with was Bloom: a drawer that fans your records into an arc, so you flip through full covers like the pages of a book. It's patented now (FR2504530). Back then it was just the thing we'd wanted and couldn't buy.
We built the first ones by hand, for ourselves and for friends who'd seen them and wanted their own. One night I posted a video on a whim. I woke up to thousands of collectors from all over the world sharing it and asking the same question: where can I buy this? We were an amateur and a craftsman, with a name nobody knew. The answer, that morning, was nowhere. It changed everything that came after.
What we're actually building
Here's the thing we care about, under the furniture: we want people to enjoy their records more. Not to own more, not to store more — to play more of what they already have, and to feel more when they do.
A collection is a life. The record someone gave you, the one from that summer, the one you've played to death and the one you keep meaning to return to. When you can see all of it, you play more of it. You rediscover your own taste. The choosing becomes part of the listening — arguably the part that makes vinyl feel lived-in where a file never will. Our furniture exists to make that moment easy, and to give it the room it deserves.
Maison & Objet, September 2026
A few months after that first video, the team at Maison & Objet — Paris's design fair — invited us to show Groovaly as part of Design District, their emerging design selection. We didn't expect it, and it mattered.
If you're in Paris from 10 to 14 September, come find us: Hall 5A, Stand E111. We'll have the full range and a few new pieces made for the occasion. We'd genuinely love to hear what you think.
A collection that grows
We build for the way a collection actually behaves: it grows. So the furniture is made to grow with it — pieces that stack and align, added one at a time, as the records ask for more room. Nothing is finished the day it arrives. You start with what you need and extend when you need to.
Everything is designed by the two of us in Paris and made in Europe. That's how we want it to stay.
Say hello
If you already live with a Groovaly piece — thank you, truly. Nothing means more to us than seeing where our furniture ends up, so send us your photos:
contact@groovaly.com.
And if you don't yet: happy browsing. Take your time choosing. That's the whole idea.
Romain Muller — Founder, Groovaly