UPDATE: Congratulations to Kyle and Alex, the Floyd Leg has been fully funded via Kickstarter as of about 16 hours ago!
So, what is it?
It's so simple, it's a wonder no one has created this before now. The Floyd Leg is like a C-clamp with a long, tapered, powder-coated steel attached leg. A tool that gives you the framework to take be the creator of your own furniture by utilizing wood slabs, signs, old doors, art, reclaimed materials or found objects (basically anything flat) that can serve as a surface.
The easy-to-attach legs emerged from a personal need combined with curiosity. Living a rather nomadic lifestyle with work and school took designer Kyle Hoff to several different cities in which he found himself buying (and ultimately) discarding furniture repeatedly. He then decided that he'd like a work desk which was was easy to pack up and move around, without sacrificing aesthetic appeal or requiring any building expertise.
Kyle met future partner Alex O'Dell while designing and building out a workspace in the North Corktown neighborhood of Detroit. The building itself was formerly an auto garage.
With this history in mind, their philosophy was a minimal use of materials in order to contrast the new with the old.
above: Kyle Hoff and Alex O'Dell
After completion of the space, the Floyd Legs became their next project with these same values in mind: simple, useful, adaptive. They see the legs as a tool for people to be inventive with their furniture and reflective of their lives —without needing the skills and expertise to build from scratch.
The name Floyd harkens back to the name of Hoff's father, grandfather, and great grandfather, all steel mill workers. In the same spirit of local manufacturing, he and partner Alex O'Dell have established partnerships with local machine shops to produce the legs.
Specifications
The Floyd Leg is available in two different lengths and two different colors. Black or white powder-coated in 29” table height and a 16” coffee table height. They are produced in Detroit and made with American steel.
The legs are best suited to medium and light uses (the suggested weight to support is 75 lbs or less). However, the weight is less important as the size of the material you use. For these reasons they recommend uses such as desks, coffee tables, foyer tables, planting tables, etc. But they wouldn't recommend things that require larger surfaces and heavy interaction such as dining/dinner tables since there is no cross bracing.
The Floyd Leg has raised well over their initial goal of $18,000 on Kickstarter (as of February 4th they'd raised $214,871) and they intend to modify the prototype model with a larger clamping area on the fastener, ultimately making the leg stronger and easier to use. Rather than the small foot that is currently on the end of the fastener, the new model will have a 1.5" diameter foot for a better connection.
Kyle and Alex are both University of Michigan grads and designers based out of Detroit. They met while building out a workspace in a former auto-garage in the North Corktown neighborhood of Detroit. The approach utilized a minimal set of materials in order to contrast the old with the new. After the completion of the workspace, Alex joined Kyle in the launching of Floyd. Much like the reuse of the auto garage — Floyd is a framework for the re-imagining of existing resources.
•The Floyd Leg website
•The Floyd Leg on Kickstarter