To me, Orange’s 40th year is a proud milestone which is as much about looking to the future as it is about celebrating our past achievements.

In 2007 I spent many hours leafing through the Orange archive and reminding myself about just how we got here – a world-class brand whose contribution to British exports was recognised in 2006 when we were given the Queen’s Award for Enterprise – International Trade.

Later this year you will see my recollections about Orange’s forty-year journey in the form of a grandly illustrated, large-format coffee-table book. And as I went down memory lane, what struck me was that although in many ways everything has changed since I first opened the Orange shop for business on 2nd September 1968, in other ways very little has changed.

Then as now,  we spend a lot of time talking to guitarists in order to discover exactly the sounds that they are after: that’s how we developed the classic 1970s Pics Only sound that, forty years on, is still an important sonic reference point for our Technical & Research Department.

And from the word go we never made any cost-cutting compromises as far as an amplifier’s quality of build was concerned. Back then we insisted on buying-in the best transformers regardless of cost; and today I can proudly say that after the painstaking R&D work done by us in recent years, we ourselves have now designed what I consider to be the best range of transformers ever made.

A third thing that hasn’t changed at Orange is our attitude: we still like to do things very differently – who else would think of introducing a collectors limited edition of 40th Anniversary Custom Shop amplifiers, but identifying each one of the forty made with a girl’s name and not with a serial number!

Looking beyond our 40th anniversary, our focus will naturally still be on making the very best guitar amplifiers available.

But also look out for the unexpected: for instance, in the near future we are planning to establish OrangeAid – a charity that will help musicians who in the past have given much to the world of music, but did so at considerable personal cost to themselves.

I do hope you like our new-look website and that you visit it very often and enjoy being a part of the worldwide Orange community. Whatever is happening at Orange, you will hear about it first here.

As ever, I wish you every success in your world of music.

Cliff Cooper