Do you have a shirt or a pair of pants that are not quite clean but also not quite stinky enough to put in the hamper yet? You’ve probably just thrown them on that one chair, right? You know, the chair in your bedroom or living room that seems to have spent more of its life holding a pile of clothes than being a usable seat.
This is the seemingly universal shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simone Giertz wanted to solve. To do that, she built a Laundry Chair, meant to hold laundry and function as a chair at the same time. No more compromises.
“You can pin it to my reluctance for behavioral change,” Giertz says. “This was one of those projects where I was like, I can’t believe this isn’t already a thing.”
Courtesy of Yetch Studio
After making a video of building the chair more than a year ago, Giertz is turning it into a real product you can buy. It started as a Kickstarter campaign—launched today, and is already funded—though Giertz says the plan was to make the product regardless of whether or not the campaign succeeded. The starting price is $1,100, though there are discounts for backers (the first 50 got free shipping).
“It’s a little bit of a chore thorn in everybody’s side, an eyesore and something you have to deal with,” Giertz says. “I had it on my list of ideas for a long time—something that honored the chair’s job of holding clothes, acknowledged that, and actually tried to do the job properly.”
The Laundry Chair indeed looks like and works as a chair, the key difference being that the arm rests are constructed as a rotatable semicircle. A ball-bearing mechanism lets you smoothly spin the rail around, like a lazy Susan. Turn it around to the front, and you can hang clothes over the bar like you would on a clothesline or drying rack. Spin the rail back around, and the clothes slide neatly behind the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether laden with laundry or not, the chair looks quite nice, with a solid hardwood frame and corduroy cotton upholstery.
Giertz has built a following on inventive, wild creations, like a robot that flings soup, or that time she turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, she shifted her focus from building “shitty robots” to creating genuinely useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or the playfully maddening all-white puzzle with one missing piece.
