Gantri and Sixtysix Celebrate the Wireless Collection

Last week, carved out of the NeoCon whirlwind, Gantri and Sixtysix gathered a group of Chicago designers at Tzuco, Chef Carlos Gaytán’s Mexican restaurant on State Street in River North, for a dinner with two things to celebrate: Gantri’s inclusion in this year’s Paved States x Haworth DesignLab exhibition at NeoCon 2026, and the debut of Gantri Wireless, the brand’s first portable lighting collection.

The group settled into Tzuco’s private dining room, a gray, rustic space that suited the evening’s tone. Courses were served family style, all drawn from Tzuco’s signature blend of Mexican cooking, alongside a round of cocktails as inventive as the food. Outside NeoCon’s usual pace continued at full speed, but for a couple of hours, this corner of the show slowed down.

The guest list read like a who’s-who of Chicago’s design community. Founders, principals, senior designers, and directors from studios like PROjECT Interiors, Soucie Horner Group, Boone Interiors, Smith Group, Brooke Lang Design Studio, and 555 International packed the room. Benjamin Edgar, Larry Tchogninou of Points of Sail, Lara Tekneyan of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, and Zac Benloulou of Pavilion Audio Systems, rounded things out, among others. 

Gantri Wireless, powered by the brand’s new Helia platform, held court on the exhibition’s retail table all week, untethered and begging to be played with. Visitors were able to pick them up, turn them on, and move them around as they envisioned each piece in their own space. The Drift brought a smooth, organic crown, while The Eave showcased a translucent shade and integrated handle. The Pier, a playful riff on a support beam, pulled double duty as both task light and a mood piece. Ian Yang, Gantri’s founder and CEO, has described the collection as a return to something older: light that moves with you, the way a candle or lantern once did, before it was fixed to the wall. 

Gantri has spent the better part of a decade making a pretty convincing case that lighting doesn’t need to follow the old rules of manufacturing. Founded in San Francisco in 2016, the company built its name on a print-to-order model: lamps designed by a rotating cast of independent and emerging designers, printed on demand using its own fleet of 3D printers rather than left to gather dust in a warehouse. It’s a model built on a simple bet that designers do better work when they’re not boxed in by the cost and waste of traditional tooling.

Since then, Gantri has kept pushing that idea further: a material platform built around plant-based polymers, and more recently, Gantri Made, a self-serve manufacturing service that lets outside studios and brands tap into its production system to bring their own designs to life. The overall goal is to make better design more accessible, and make the path from sketch to shelf shorter.

Talk at the table moved across materials and sourcing and what’s actually happening at The Mart this year, through the programming at Paved States and what it means for NeoCon to carve out space for work that lives outside the industry’s usual categories. It was a fitting note to end the night on: a room full of people who shape how spaces look and feel, gathered around one table instead of a trade show floor.

gantri.com