Half-baked idea: clothes shopping in your hotel room closet

Half-baked idea: clothes shopping in your hotel room closet

I put a bunch of post ideas on hold when I wound up getting a "real job". I found myself without the cycles to write regularly on the outside world. All of that energy and passion was being poured into the job. I gave talks, taught classes, mentored people, and all of that, in addition to the technical wrangling that I was expected to do.

Some of these post ideas were also product ideas. I've been going back to them in the past few days, and I found one that was worth writing around as "yet another half-baked idea". However, while putting this post together today, I decided to do the obvious thing and see if someone else had done it already.

Guess what, someone did. I found a NY Times article from 2015 describing this same idea. I'll give you my take on it first.

Travel takes you to temporary housing for a few days or weeks at a time. Unless you like to travel "heavy", you end up having to choose a subset of your closet to bring with you. The choices you make on that last day at home define what sort of looks you can create on your trip. Do you bring it all with you, do you get lucky and choose just right up front, or do you just hope for the best?

What if the hotel room came with a bunch of interesting stuff in your size? The hotel would know you were coming and could put things in the closet before you got there. Everything would have a huge tag on it like a prom dress. You could try it on and check it out in your room, and if you liked it, you'd just remove the tag and it would be yours. The charge would show up on the bill.

I originally wrote this one down as "minibar for clothes in hotel room" and "if you like it, take off the tag and it's yours". It's in some note on my phone from 2011, back before a bunch of notes about jury duty.

Anyway, here's the NY Times article from 2015 describing the same idea.

Filed under "things I thought about but never acted on". Oh well.