In 2024, there is no room for ugliness at home. Consider: the sexy toilet, the sexy dumbbells, the sexy air fryer, and now, the sexy broom.
Dotti’s new broom and dustpan launched in December and its mission is simple: to provide durability and performance without compromising esthetics. For the not-so-sexy sum of $85, you can own a sleek sage-green broom that will make you feel like an Instagram influencer with a minimalist home worthy of its own reel. It only took 35 iterations to get the design right.
The majority of brooms and dustpans on the market are flawed and frustrating to use. Pet hair gets caught in the bristles, and unless your dustpan comes with one of those combs, you have to remove it with your own hands. Dustpans are ugly, plasticky, and unwieldy if you have to bend a dozen times to get the job done. And no matter what you do, a pesky line of dust always remains on the floor.
Dotti’s broom comes with silicone bristles and a demountable head, so you can wash it under warm soapy water. Like most brooms, it has a telescopic pole, but unlike most brooms, the wider tube is at the bottom (not at the top), so the weight is closer to the floor for more comfort. Meanwhile, the dustpan sports an ingenious footplate that lets you glide it around the floor with your foot and sweep debris right into its cavity without having to bend down.
Both objects look so elegant it would be a sin to keep them in the closet, and so intuitive you’d never guess they went through 35 iterations. “Neither Rachel nor I understood that creating a very simple product could be so difficult,” says Amanda Riva who cofounded Dotti with her sister Rachel Garbutt.
The dustpan was the trickiest to design as hands-free dustpans are extremely rare (and if they exist, they look like this.) The team had to switch designers twice and manufacturers three times. “We went from cardboard molds to physically 3D printing, using a file, shaving it, going back, refining the 3D print, shaving again, testing again, going back to the cardboard mold,” she says. The broom was a bit more straightforward, but the team still ended up 3D printing 20 different telescoping mechanisms to get the right weight and thickness.
When I tested the product last month, I found the foothold so easy to use I caught myself sweeping my kitchen floors more often. The finish inside the dustpan was still too glossy for my liking and my dog’s hair had a hard time clinging to the surface, but Riva assured me that a future iteration will include a grippier surface. I was, however, surprised to find out that the broom was also efficient on my rug, meaning fewer trips were necessary to fetch the vacuum cleaner from the closet.
Now, my New York apartment doesn’t have enough space for a Dotti broom casually leaning against an open wall, so it also lives in my closet—but unlike my vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t have to.
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