We all have a random chair in our bedroom that we can never really sit on because it is blanketed in half-dirty laundry. Now, that chair has received a major upgrade.
Swedish inventor Simone Giertz has created an ingenious armchair with a swiveling backrest that doubles as a clothing rack. The entire backrest sits on a spinning base akin to a Lazy Susan and turns 360 degrees around the chair: You can drape a pair of jeans on the backrest, whirl it away, and sit on your chair with your clothes still chilling in the back. The chair has been such a hit on social media that Giertz is planning to manufacture it at scale and sell it. “I’ve never been called a genius this much,” she says.
Giertz, who lives in L.A., was once known for making comedically sloppy gadgets like an alarm clock that slaps you awake with a Halloweeny rubber arm, or a “breakfast machine” that can feed you Cheerios with the accuracy of a bear wearing mittens. But a couple of years ago, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots” swapped her crown for a (slightly) more serious graduation cap. “I used to be terrified of taking myself and the things that I made seriously, but then I was blessed with the miracle of being in my thirties,” she said in an email. (That, and she was diagnosed with a noncancerous meningioma in 2018 that gave her perspective.)
In 2022, Giertz launched a product design company and online store called Yetch, where she sells her inventions, which include a light-up calendar that helps you track a daily task like meditating, and a folding hanger that takes up half the space of a regular hanger.
The laundry chair “almost built itself,” says Giertz. First, she tried to make the clothes look like they were part of the upholstery, but the design didn’t look intentional. Then the movable rail came to mind. She bought a giant Lazy Susan, and within a week, she had built a prototype out of cardboard, then another out of plywood, and a third one out of oak.
And just like that, a chair that was once a point of shame has become a point of pride in her bedroom. “If I have clothes on my chair nine out of ten days,” she says, “shouldn’t the chair be designed for the nine days with clothes rather than the one day without?”