Imagine furnishing an entire dorm room with just one portable box that opens up to reveal a ready-to-assemble bed, chair, desk and dresser.
A Toronto startup is hoping to bring that reality to university and college students across Canada.
Our Paper Life recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise US$185,000 so they can begin manufacturing their "Room in a Box."
The box itself is quite plain – it's white and comes with wheels on the bottom so it can easily be rolled around. Inside, however, is a different story. There's a red chair, a green desk, blue boxes that can be stacked to create a dresser, and even a bed.
The company says the concept behind the portable room was inspired by a student's nomadic lifestyle.
Moving can run a student hundreds of dollars each time – there's the cost of hiring movers, buying boxes to pack everything in, and renting a truck to haul all that stuff to the new pad. It's a cost most students (and likely their parents) cringe at when everything is tallied up.
And so co-founder of Our Paper Life, Jordan Whelan, and his team wanted to come up with a way to cut down that cost by creating a pre-fab room that can be put together in less than hour.
"We wanted to make it super easy," Whelan told CTV Toronto. "We call it the 30-minute move. We think the whole thing can be done in 30 minutes, including the amount of time to actually order it online."
The Room in a Box will cost US$149 and includes shipping.
The furniture is made of laminate cardboard and everything can be assembled without tools or glue. Whelan says the cardboard is quite sturdy. According to the company's crowdfunding site, their prototype desk has lasted for more than three years.
"I think a lot of people assume when they see cardboard, they think maybe a shoebox," Whelan said. "But if you design cardboard a certain way, it actually is quite a sturdy material."
The Room in a Box crowdfunding campaign has so far raised more than US$6,000.
The company says they hope to expand the idea in the future, creating portable rooms for offices and those working in disaster relief operations.
With a report from CTV Toronto's Pat Foran
