Who Is This Laundry-Folding Machine Actually For?

What if we made a machine that could fold laundry? Sounds like a great idea, but in practice, there’s a lot that complicates the implementation. This new laundry-folding machine called FoldiMate, for example, looks like a dream come true … but it has some downsides.

Let’s start with the upsides, shall we? The FoldiMate steams clothes so you don’t have to iron them before folding them (yay!), it does a way better job folding shirts than I ever bother to do on my own (double-yay!) and it doesn’t look like it would take that long to put the clothes into the machine … if you only have twelve shirts, and no other laundry besides shirts (half-hearted yay).

The downsides: it costs $700-$850, and that price isn’t final, because pre-orders haven’t even begun yet. Since demand is already high, according to FoldiMate’s excited announcement on their Facebook, I think we can safely bet that this machine will end up on the pricier side of that prediction.

More downsides: it only appears to fold shirts. What about pants? What about if you own too many shirts for the machine to fold at one time? What about folding all your socks and dresses and skirts and leggings and other unusually-shaped garments? Plus there’s underwear, which obviously I don’t fold because why bother, but it still has to be separated out from all the other clothing and stacked up neatly. That takes time, and this folding machine is supposed to be saving me time!

In the promotional video above, we see a stereotypical nuclear family with a Mom who’s just trying to keep up with all her chores. But even Mom wouldn’t be able to get out of sorting the laundry for this machine, because she would need to divide up all of the shirts according to family member. She’d have to make a pile for herself, her husband, her son, and her daughter, and then put each pile of shirts separately into the machine, while the others sit there getting wrinkled. At the end of the video, there’s a shot of the young son using the machine to fold his own shirts. But did he help his Mom with sorting all the laundry? And if so, why not just ask him to help fold it? With four people on the job, folding laundry doesn’t even take that long. Plus you can watch movies while you do it. As far as chores go, it’s not that bad.

All that said, I’m still glad this machine exists, and it’s all because of this one commenter on the FoldiMate Facebook page who explains how this will help her to more easily fold her clothes even though she has chronic pain and arthritis. For that reason alone, FoldiMate should exist, and it’s too bad that it’s so expensive, because it seems like it could help a lot of disabled people.

I’ve often heard from friends in the past that a lot of these “time-saver” inventions are actually used most often by disabled people, even though disabled customers almost never appear in any of the marketing materials. Their non-presence in advertising leads the public to conclude that these inventions are completely worthless and geared towards the lazy rich. That’s a shame. For the Mom in the video, this machine does look worthless, and it doesn’t even seem like a time-saver. But for a person who can’t fold clothes otherwise? It’s a great invention. Perhaps FoldiMate should consider incorporating that into their marketing.

(via Geeks Are Sexy)

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