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.

NEW YORK — Contemporary furniture specialist Blu Dot is placing 25 of its Real Good chairs around the New York City area, and they are free for the taking.

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.