Toss Your Not-Quite-Clean Clothes on Simone Giertz’s Laundry Chair
Do you have a shirt or pants that aren’t quite clean but don’t smell enough to put in the hamper? You probably just threw them in that chair, didn’t you? 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.
It’s this seemingly universal shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simone Giertz wanted to solve. To do this, she built a laundry chair, intended to hold the laundry. And function as a chair at the same time. No more compromises.
“You can attribute that to my reluctance to change my behavior,” says Giertz. “It 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 the chair’s construction over a year ago, Giertz is turning it into a real product you can buy. It started with a Kickstarter campaign, launched today and already funded, although Giertz says the plan was to make the product whether the campaign was successful or not. The starting price is $1,100, but there are discounts for backers (first 50 get free shipping).
“It’s a bit of a hassle for everyone, a horror 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 president’s job of holding the clothes, recognized it and tried to do the job right.”
The Laundry Chair indeed looks like a chair and functions like a chair, the main difference being that the armrests are constructed as a rotating semi-circle. A ball bearing mechanism lets you spin the rail smoothly, like a lazy Susan. Flip it forward and you can hang clothes above the bar just like you would on a clothesline or drying rack. Rotate the rod and clothes slide neatly behind the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether loaded with laundry or not, the chair is quite nice, with a solid hardwood frame and cotton corduroy upholstery.
Giertz has built her clientele through inventive and wild creations, like a robot that throws soup, or that time she turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, she moved away from building “crappy robots” to creating truly useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or a fun, maddening, all-white puzzle with a missing piece.
