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Smart Closets of the Future

I’m gonna let you guys in on a secret. I’m an extremely lazy person by nature. And that’s what drives me to look for proptech that makes life easier for everyone, but mostly myself. Jeff Bezos lives by a regret minimization framework. I live by a laziness maximization framework. I have a long wish list of proptech ideas that don’t exist, and today I’m going to share one of them with you.. Smart Closets!

There are plenty of concepts out there for how smart closets should work, and they mostly involve some sort of augmented reality mirror. That doesn’t maximize laziness enough for me.

My Dream Smart Closet User Experience…

I get out of bed in the morning and think “what should I wear today?” Then I remember that the pandemic is still raging and I don’t have to change. Fast forward past the pandemic and maybe when this technology exists. I get out of bed in the morning and think “wow I’m really old.” And then I remember that I retired already and I don’t have to change. But maybe I feel like playing tennis because my bionic legs allow me to still do that at my advanced age.

Let’s say I’ve got a tennis date on my calendar in my lazy retired life. In anticipation, my closet interface would ask me what court surface I’m playing on and which outfit I’d want to wear. The closet itself wouldn’t have any doors. Just a receptacle in the wall, maybe 2x3x3 feet. I’ll answer and poot! Out comes the shirt, shorts, socks, wristbands, shoes, sports bag, racquets, can of balls, water bottle, from the receptacle!

When I come back, I throw the racquets, shoes, and bag back into the receptacle and the smart closet takes care of properly storing it. The rest of the stuff needs to be cleaned so it wouldn’t go back immediately.

Basically I’m so lazy that I don’t want to open a closet door and use my own hands to grab something. My dream closet would eliminate the need to organize a closet and remember where things are, while also maximizing utilization of space behind the walls, or maybe in the floors. The only visible parts would be the receptacle, and the interface, which might be through your phone (if phones even still look like they do today).

Use Beyond Just Closets

This retrieval system wouldn’t have to be restricted to closets. It could be for any storage space, like kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities. Imagine how clean a kitchen would look like if instead of any cabinets you just had a single receptacle for retrieval and storage. The actual storage location could be out of sight behind the walls or under the floor.

Use Beyond Your Apartment

Imagine if all tenants in a multifamily building had access to community items, and landlords built a subscription fee into the rent. For example, the kitchen aid blender with every accessory would be super expensive for a single person to own, and rarely used too. The cost per use would be astronomical.

But if smart closets were connected to communal building storage, you could summon it on command. It would save costs and storage space for everyone in the building! And the software would eventually develop usage predictions and schedules for every catalogued item to maximize utilization. This is basically where the sharing economy is heading.

How To Build My Dream Smart Closet

My vision for smart closets are basically what would happen if you made a search engine operate in the physical world. It would need machine vision capability to identify items and characteristics. Then it would need to index items by size, weight, and predicted frequency of use.

The software portion would be a pretty straightforward mix of classification and indexing, and it would constantly get firmware updates as the system accumulates more usage data. The software would continually strive to optimize retrieval time so that it’s significantly faster than using your own hands.

The hardware side would be really tricky. Perhaps a series of standard container sizes stored in a rack like system. Automated parking systems or automated self storage buildings are probably the closest analogues that exist. This technology would need to be shrunken down and customized to accommodate anything that can fit into the receptacle. So it’d have to be quite a bit more sophisticated.

Why aren’t you pursuing this idea, Derek? Were you paying attention? I said I’m extremely lazy, and this requires starting an entire new business and raising capital. I’m just throwing this idea out there because it’s not something that makes sense as part of my business model but I’d love to see someone implement it. If you want to help make this idea a reality, feel free to share this post (and video) with people who have the right resources to pull it off.

Speaking of which, there are two companies that could probably pivot or evolve into developing this. Ori, which makes transforming furniture, and Bumblebee Spaces, which makes retrievable ceiling storage.