Buyer Be Aware

In Consumed: Obsessive Consumption: Products that are meant to make you think – about your purchase.

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.” …
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Additional link: Obsessive Consumption.com.