Blu Dot follows its wayfaring chairs
Company scatters 25 Real Good chairs around New York
Gary James -- Furniture Today, November 5, 2009
 One of Blu Dot’s Real Good chairs awaits pickup by a passerby at Wooster and Canal streets in New York. |
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of its store here, the Minneapolis-based company is putting a new spin on the age-old city pastime of finding furniture or art on the street and giving it a new home.
Some of the chairs have been equipped with GPS devices so that their movements can be tracked in real time at realgood.bludot.com/. Updates from the field will be delivered on the company's Twitter feed at twitter.com/realgoodchair.
Blu Dot started placing the chairs on New York streets Wednesday and will put the rest out today.
The company explains the project on its Web site this way: "When we opened our SoHo store in 2008, we became surrounded by the resourceful culture of ‘curb-mining': the act of finding furniture and art on the street.
"Now that a year has passed, our friends at mono (a branding agency that works with Blu Dot) approached us with a way to conduct a curb-mining experiment of our own: What would happen if we left a bunch of Real Good Chairs all over New York, free for the taking? Who will grab them? Where will they go? How will they get there? What will their new homes look like? Thus, the Real Good experiment was born."
Once the chairs have been moved into permanent homes, the company says it will track down the owners, who will be featured in a video to be released on the Blu Dot Web site in December.
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another ash kissin tale of I need werk, so ill kish yer but.viktur...
but a
grt idea from blu dot gang and again they show a new way to get attention and have fun .....hope they sell a ton of chairs fun idea
furneey man - 2009-9-11 11:01:58 EST -
Wow! A 21st Century way to do business and the cheapest form of advertising combined. Congratulations to the management team at Blu Dot. You are setting a superb example to the other furniture retailers (and manufacturers) who are light years behind you in their methodology. Good luck and let's hear more about the results of this new 'design idea'!
Victor Pedraz - 2009-6-11 10:16:15 EST
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