Dress-a-vac
Catalog stores are fascinating for examples of products that acknowledge but do not solve new problems. Dress-a-vac is a case-in-point, a costume to dress up your vacuum cleaner as a Bear, Bunny, Cat or (ironically) Maid. One of these things is not like the other! The implication here is that our closets are so filled with other crap that there’s no room to keep the vacuum clear, so it needs to be kept out (I’ve seen this happen in user research; perhaps because it was just handier to leave it out anyway); but then you have this backstage-looking machine sitting in your lovely frontstage. Their solution is to transform it into something else – a hideous dress-up doll. Requiring many steps; guaranteeing that once it’s dressed, you’ll never vacuum again, and once you vacuum, you’ll never bother with this again. But, interesting. Spotted on Boingboing.