How Ugmonk’s designer built the new Gather desk accessories - The Verge

Jeff Sheldon and Ugmonk are known for high-end T-shirts and other design-y goods. Now the company is launching a set of ultra-luxurious, ultra-expensive desk accessories. Can the company make it work?

The Verge homepageThe Verge homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo./Tech/Reviews/Science/Entertainment/MoreMenuExpandThe VergeThe Verge logo.MenuExpandTechOne designer’s quest to build the world’s greatest desk accessoriesUgmonk started as a T-shirt store — now founder Jeff Sheldon is trying to turn it into something much more ambitious. But as he knows, hardware is hard.By David Pierce

Share this storyJeff Sheldon’s desk is a well-known thing on the internet – now he’s trying to upgrade it.Jeff Sheldon’s desk is sort of famous. You might have even seen it before: Sheldon, the founder and CEO of a high-design shop called Ugmonk, uploaded a few photos to Unsplash several years ago, and his ultra-clean setup filled with natural wood and white colors has since been viewed more than 400 million times. People have been asking him for a decade where he got his cool monitor stand, even though it’s actually just an Ikea hack. The desk sits in Sheldon’s home office in suburban Pennsylvania, in the corner of a sun-soaked room with so many windows and so many trees just outside the windows that commenters occasionally ask if he lives in the jungle.

The day I meet Sheldon, he’s looking at that desk from the other side of his home office on a bright, hot day near the end of summer. He’s in jeans and a black T-shirt, and limping ever so slightly thanks to a recent soccer injury. His workspace looks normal enough — a little cleaner than usual, maybe, and Sheldon did just spend a few minutes making sure all the accessories were at perfect 90-degree angles. But a few feet away stand a handful of people and a heaping mound of camera gear. Two of them push a makeshift dolly with a Red camera on it, slowly, steadily in the direction of the desk, as Sheldon walks into frame and sits down. The shot ends in a perfect modern still-life: Sheldon hard at work, his dog Pixel lying on a bed a few feet behind him.

The crew is here to shoot a video for Ugmonk’s latest Kickstarter project for a line of desk accessories called Gather. Gather’s unofficial mission statement is, essentially, that it’s okay to be messy, but it should also be easy to clean up. Sheldon, who has young kids, seems to wage a perpetual battle between his minimalistic and fussy designer tendencies and the simple realities of life. And so Gather is, in one sense, just a set of beautiful containers: a wooden pen holder, a padded stand for your phone, an all-metal bin where you can stash business cards and random detritus, a monitor stand with a dedicated slot for your papers. A place for everything, Gather promises, even if everything’s not always in its place.

For Sheldon, though, Gather is also the most complicated, most ambitious, most difficult thing he has ever made. It’s actually his second attempt to make these kinds of products after the first didn’t go to plan. This time, all the pieces are extremely high quality and extremely high priced. Sheldon admires designers like Dieter Rams, Saul Bass, and Paul Rand and aspires to build things akin to the classic Eames chair. Maybe they won’t be heirloom desk accessories, maybe that’s not even a thing, but Sheldon’s aiming for “definitely heirloom quality.” In a world of cheap crap and planned obsolescence, Ugmonk wants to make things that last as long as you need them.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/15/23404275/ugmonk-gather-desk-accessories-jeff-sheldon


Post ID: 1db63ffd-e0d3-44b5-8370-5a2b2677dab2
Rating: 5
Created: 1 year ago
Your ad can be here
Create Post

Similar classified ads


News's other ads