Furniture designers have not kept pace with the way we store our clothes—and the sheer amount that we have. Consider how antiquated the chest of drawers is, and what a poor solution it provides in the era of fast fashion. Does it make sense to stack things horizontally, and dig through the entire pile to get to an item at the bottom?



Last year our resident organization expert, Jeri Dansky, found that some folks had thus come up with an alternative method of storing shirts: Like file folders. It makes good sense. And now Joe and Sami Kuipers, an entrepreneurial husband-and-wife team, has taken that concept and designed a simple product and system around it.

I don't say it's the perfect solution, but the Kuipers' EZSTAX system is certainly a great version 1.0 of how we ought to store clothes in the future. I'm also impressed with this early take considering these guys aren't even industrial designers:



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I call it clever in that the "hinges" are simply a function of the protrusions nesting into one another. I'm also digging that they're made from recycled materials. Again, it's not perfect—after days of usage the end user will have empty slots in the middle, and refilling them will necessitate removing the ones on top*, which is similar to the original problem—but at least these guys are trying. Until furniture designers step up with something new, we'll be looking out for inventive laypeople devising their own solutions.



*Editor's note: The following quote was sent to us by Joe Kuipers:

I was hoping you might take a look at seconds 1:07 through 1:10 again on our video.

We truly tried to design EZSTAX to be easy to remove the empty dividers. Some of our original prototypes did not accomplish that function so we went back to the drawing board until we had a product that was easy to remove. Basically, you just have to tilt up a bit further and give it a little lift and the empty ones slide right out so it shouldn't necessitate removing the rest of the pile.

The Kuipers put the EZSTAX up on Kickstarter, and it's already landed $35,000 on a $10,000 goal, with 25 days left. More power to them.



So, if this is the 1.0, do any of you ID'ers have ideas for the 2.0?