Most Bluetooth speakers look the same. They are round, black, rubberized, and built to disappear into a shelf or a beach bag without asking anyone to notice them twice. That sameness is the actual problem nobody talks about. We have accepted that everyday tech gets to be boring looking, as long as it works, and we have quietly let go of the idea that an object we use daily should also mean something.
Larry Tchogninou’s new speaker, Gankéké, pushes back on that quietly accepted trade off. Instead of starting from a generic pod shape, he built the entire object around the form of the gankéké, a double bell used in ceremonial and communal music across Benin, where Tchogninou is from. The result is a speaker shaped like two flared cones meeting at a center point, wrapped in wood veneer, and mounted on a sandblasted aluminum frame with an oak dowel handle running through the top. It looks nothing like a gadget. It looks like an instrument that happens to play your Spotify queue.
Designer: Larry Tchogninou
Tchogninou is a Chicago based architect and designer who was mentored early on by Virgil Abloh, and that lineage shows up in how he treats materials as carriers of meaning rather than just finishes. He has said he started making Gankéké after realizing how many audio gadgets he had been gifted over the years without ever understanding how any of them actually worked. So he built his own, and instead of hiding the engineering, he built a housing that turns the mechanics into the whole point of looking at it.
Inside the two wooden horns sit lateral speakers, with a central subwoofer positioned between them in a magnet to magnet configuration for stability. The controls are refreshingly analog for something wireless. Volume and power sit on the right side, a dedicated bass dial sits on the left, and there is a micro USB charging port along with a line in jack for anyone who still wants a wired connection. Tchogninou says it holds about three hours of playback at medium volume, which is not going to outlast a flight to Los Angeles, but that was never really the pitch.
What actually sells the object is the craft. Every unit is made to order, built from plastic, wood veneer, dowels, and sandblasted aluminum, with a four week lead time before it ships. That kind of patience is rare in a category where most people expect same day delivery for a speaker they will forget about in a year. Gankéké costs $700, which sounds steep next to a mass produced speaker until you consider what you are actually paying for. You are not buying a component. You are buying a small sculpture with a working speaker built into its logic, made by one person who understood the shape before he understood the circuitry.
I like that this object does not try to hide where it came from to seem more universal. A lot of design aimed at a broad audience tends to sand down anything culturally specific until it reads as generically modern. Gankéké does the opposite. It keeps the bell shape legible, keeps the name intact, and lets the story sit right on the surface instead of tucking it into a press release nobody reads. That choice makes the object feel less like a lifestyle accessory and more like a small act of memory that happens to also connect to your phone.
Objects like this will never replace the fifty dollar speaker that lives in a gym bag, and that is fine, because that was never the competition. What Gankéké actually competes with is the idea that a speaker has to be forgettable to be useful. It does not. It can hold a shape passed down through generations, sit on a shelf as something worth looking at, and still play music when you need it to. That combination is harder to pull off than it sounds, and Tchogninou managed it without making the object feel like a costume.
