Legs-to-go fills furniture design void
Take two young guys with college degrees in architecture and public policy. Mix in frequent moving from apartment to apartment, and you have design inspiration. Such were the ingredients that led to the Floyd Leg, a surprisingly stylish metal clamp that solves a furnishing dilemma for urbanites and millennials around the world.
After Kyle Hoff, 27, received his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and became professionally transient, he quickly realized that tables resist relocation. Travelling light means unwieldy furniture ends up on Craigslist. That observation became Hoff’s necessity-isthe-mother-of-invention moment, and he began toying with creating table legs to-go.
“It was born of thinking, ‘There has to be a better way,’? Hoff says. “It wasn’t so much like there was a moment and the clamp was it. It was the broader idea of furniture and how people live right now.”
When Hoff left a large Chicago architectural firm for work in Detroit, he (easily) brought his prototype leg along for the ride.
His job change and move were about a desire to work on ideas of a small focus that could, as he says, “come to fruition of my own power.”
Enter Detroit co-worker Alex O’Dell, 24, a Michigan native with a degree in public policy who had been working on films about people living in cities. O’Dell thought the clamps were practical — and there was a good story behind them.
“The legs are a lot about expressing your creativity,” O’Dell says. “They had a lot of potential in terms of how we live in cities.”
Hoff and O’Dell launched a Kickstarter campaign in January 2014 to fund production and quickly learned their idea had legs, so to speak.
They met their goal within two days, which, instead of being a champagne moment, was more like, better “brew up the coffee,” O’Dell says. “There was excitement and then the reality.”
The reality being that they had to figure out how to produce 2,000 sets and deliver them around the world.
The resulting product, named for Hoff’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather — all named Floyd and all steel-mill workers in his native Youngstown, Ohio — is gaining traction.
The legs, brackets and utility sets are shipped worldwide, often to 20- and 30-somethings in Lon- don, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Small-space dwellers can combine Floyd Legs with a surface that’s custom-cut or selected to fit a small niche or corner.