About

Benjamin Edgar Gott

Benjamin Edgar

Benjamin Edgar Gott is a Chicago-based designer – though his extensive body of work spans beyond any one-word label, with projects rooted in:

Fundamentally, Benjamin designs objects. His ongoing project, literally named "An Object Company", stands as the culmination of over a decade's worth of research and work with varying processes and products. He creates his objects out of anything ranging from cotton to marble, characterized by a mix of irreverence and intense attention to detail. Each piece – whether designed to wear or adorn the home – balances the useful with the useless, inviting an opportunity to learn, develop, and play.

Benjamin got his start in the business world at the age of 17, during the first dot-com boom. With no formal training or education, Gott taught himself software development, professionally merging information architecture and design. He was then able to ditch the corporate world to push his own entrepreneurial limits, simultaneously writing for THE BRILLIANCE! a cultural blog started in 2005 with Chuck Anderson (and later, Virgil Abloh).

In 2009, he founded Boxed Water as an alternative to wasteful plastic bottles. The most widely recognized of his projects, Boxed Water is merely another "object" to Benjamin, differing only in the scale and problem it attempts to solve. In 2017 he created th-oughts.com, a peer-to-peer education service, with a similar mindset: to provide a tangible solution for those wary of the conventional networking scene. As a current partner at Wakestream Ventures, he's furthermore able to apply this object-oriented outlook, providing opportunity to like-minded businesses and individuals.

Gott remains open to working within new contexts, considering there's always more to learn. The end goal is to never lose curiosity.