A bedside table is the natural place for after-hours smartphone charging, but nightstand design has lagged behind the furniture's growing role as a home for devices. At least, that's the stance of Curvilux, a new company launching their first crowdfunded product: the Curvilux nightstand.
Billed as the "first connected nightstand," the bedside table not only features built-in wireless charging and UBS ports, but also boasts integrated speakers, two programmable lighting systems, motion and temperature sensors, smart home integration capabilities, and a drawer you can unlock with your phone. The accompanying smartphone app also lets users program lighting to set up a simulated sunrise alarm clock.
The bedside table is also easy on the eyes, with a mod design that would look right at home beside an IKEA bed or fancy scandi bedroom set.
Co-Founder Rodrigo Morelli told Curbed that he and his four partners were inspired by their experiences battling family and roommates for charging space.
"I only had one nightstand for the two of us, but it's where we had all of our devices — smartphones, tablets, speaker, lamp," Morelli told us. "As you can imagine, it was chaos. We said, 'we can do better.'"
The five friends (who met at university in Argentina) began brainstorming a nightstand design with integrated charging capabilities, and whipped together a prototype within a month. They spent the next year and a half refining the design and adding new features, eventually sending prototypes to live with friends and family in order to get their feedback.
"The drawer lock was something we didn't include originally," Morelli told Curbed. "But a friend told us 'I share my room and I want my stuff kept safe.'"
At one point, the team decided they didn't like the style of the table — it was too techy, too much like a gadget — so they worked with Argentine firm AeroDesign to create something simple, modern, and with a "furniture soul."
On Tuesday, the friends launched a $50,000 crowd-funding campaign, offering advance sales of the Curvilux nightstand starting at $199. They've already identified two factories in Argentina and Colombia that will manufacture their design if they meet the funding goal.
If the campaign is funded, Moretti expects they'll ship the first bedside tables in November 2016.
But the company's ambitions don't stop at the connected bedside. The Curvilux team plans to create an entire system of smart furniture pieces that look great and help users find the full benefit of their technology — with a subscription twist.
Moving to New York, Moretti and his co-founders observed that urban apartment-dwellers tended to throw out furniture every 2-3 years when they moved. So the team has started dreaming up a larger business model to address both the technological obsolescence of their connected products and the short lifespan of apartment furniture.
Curvilux plans to offer a subscription-based service that lets users swap out and upgrade their smart furniture every few months, or with every apartment move, to get the latest, most advanced models.
Curvilux: The first smart nightstand [IndieGoGo]
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