Blu Dot is a modern design-oriented furniture company that grew up in New York City. As they tell the story:

“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.”

This past November they took twenty of their “Real Good” chairs, equipped them with GPS tracking and let them loose in the Big Apple. The video below is the eight minute documentary about the experiment. Below I break down a few of the elements and ideas that make this work.

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

Campaign elements

• Microsite: smartly located at realgood.bludot.com (key part here: they didn’t go for a wholly separate URL for the short campaign)
• GPS-tracked modern chairs with map displaying locations online
• Flickr feed: displaying photos from behind the scenes and artful shots of the chairs
• Twitter account that was conversational and is still operational
• Vimeo-based documentary as a lasting record of the promotion

Why it works

• Superb planning: meticulous filming and cheeky editing
• Consistency: this wasn’t the first film or experiment Blu Dot has engaged in (other contributions to the “Good Design is Good” ethos they promote are here)
• Harnessing the inherent community spirit: this experiment wouldn’t work everywhere. But in SoHo, Blu Dot recognized the “curb-mining” culture and ran with it
• Design: most importantly, the production, film, and accompanying social tools were designed beautifully, echoing their overall point: Good Design is Good