Toss your not-so-clean clothes onto Simone Giertz’s laundry chair

Do you have A shirt or pants that isn’t quite clean but also not smelly enough to put in the hamper yet? You probably just threw them on that chair, right? You know, the chair in your bedroom or living room that looks like it spent most of its life holding up a pile of clothes instead of being a usable seat.

This is the seemingly universal shared experience that inventor and YouTube star Simon Gertz wanted to solve. To do this, she built a laundry chair, intended for holding laundry and It works as a chair at the same time. No more compromises.

“You can relate that to my reluctance to change behavior,” Gertz says. “This was one of those projects where I was like, ‘I can’t believe this isn’t a thing already.’

After filming a video of the chair’s construction over a year ago, Gertz is turning it into an actual product you can buy. It will start as a Kickstarter campaign, which launched today, though Gertz says the plan is to manufacture the product regardless of whether that campaign is successful or not. The starting price is $1,100, with a 20 percent discount and free shipping for the first 50 backers.

“It’s a little chore on everyone’s side, and it’s an eyesore, and something you have to deal with,” Gertz says. “I had it on my idea list for a long time — something that honored the chair’s function of holding clothes, acknowledged that, and actually tried to do the job right.”

The laundry chair actually looks and functions like a chair, the main difference is that the armrests are designed in a rotatable semicircle. The ball bearing mechanism allows you to rotate the rail smoothly, like a lazy Susan. Flip it forward, and you can hang clothes over the rod as you would on a clothesline or drying rack. Rotate the rail back, and clothes slide neatly behind the chair, out of sight, leaving the seat free. Whether loaded with laundry or not, the chair looks very nice, with a solid hardwood frame and short cotton upholstery.

Gertz has built a following on wild and innovative creations, like the soup-throwing robot, or that time she turned a Tesla EV into a pickup truck. Over the years, she’s shifted her focus from building “dirty robots” to creating truly useful projects, like a screwdriver ring or a maddening white puzzle with one piece missing.