Johnny Carmack was browsing the aisles of a store in his hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, when he first saw a giant strawberry on a shelf.
Carmack, 32, a content creator, was awed. “I thought, oh my God, that's so cute,” he said. “It's very fickle.”
But this strawberry doesn't come from a vine. In fact, it was a ceramic table with a cartoonish strawberry-like pattern on it. He bought a table for his office for $59.99 and redecorated the room with fake fruit in mind, adding moss panels to the door and pasting grass on the floor to resemble a garden.
Carmack is one of the many passionate people across the country who scour the aisles of discount retailers like HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, and Marshalls for culinary-inspired stools. Food as furniture has gone viral on social media, with collectors sharing photos of their finds and exchanging buying tips.
“This is a huge community,” said Carmack, who owns about 30 food stands, including stacks of donuts, peppermints and pink gummy bears. “I went wild for it,” he said of the ceramic calf figurine.
Birdie Wood also developed a love of food by chance. One day in early 2021, she was shopping online when a stool that looked like a hamburger caught her eye. “I started decorating with weird food-shaped things in 2009, so when I saw this existed I thought, this is huge,” she said. The burger was out of stock, but she got it on eBay a few weeks later.
She ended up using the hamburger as inspiration to furnish the three-bedroom, one-bathroom home she had recently moved to on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. Her home is littered with colorful, oversized objects, including a table shaped like a giant spool of thread, a large multicolored wristwatch, and 10 other food stools, including a cheese wedge. “I'm kind of basing my whole life and personality on this stupid burger stool,” she said.
Mr. Wood, 33, a woodworker, recently started making food-inspired furniture with the goal of making things you can't find in stores. Her creations include a table shaped like a stick wrapped in butter and a table resembling a can of Spam.
Ms. Wood said that for collectors like her, much of the appeal of quirky food stools is intergenerational. “I think a lot of people, especially millennials and older Gen Z, grew up with 'beige' decor,” she says. “Once we got out on set, it became OK to have fun and silly decorations.”
“I think for too long design has become very neutral, minimal and boring,” says Megan Hopp, 37, interior designer and founder of Megan Hopp Design. spoke. She said these stools are Millennials' way of rejecting a minimalist aesthetic that includes “billions of cans of gray paint that everyone has been using forever” and embracing kitsch. Ta.
But not all foods are created equal. With hundreds of different designs, the resale market for stools that are no longer available in stores can be competitive. (One reseller on eBay listed a strawberry stool for $169, more than double the price on HomeGoods.)
Finding a coveted stool often requires careful strategy, and some avid collectors have it down to a science.
Robbie Hornig, 28, who owns about 87 food stools, said the Home Goods store releases new stools each season, usually on the West Coast first. By studying the shopping habits of other food collectors on social media, “I kind of calculated how long it would take them to get here,” said Hornig, who lives in Syosset, New York.
Of course, it also helps to know the right people. “I actually became friends with some of the managers and they started telling me when they had shipments,” he said.
To cut out the middleman, Hornig has even tried sourcing directly from vendors and manufacturers, but so far without success. “There were so many stools I wanted, I had to find a way to find them faster,” he said. (A spokesperson for TJX, the parent company of TJ Maxx Marshalls & Home Goods, said in an email to the New York Times that the company cannot comment on vendors or the products in its stores.)
But the thrill of the hunt is also part of the fun for many collectors, and Mr. Carmack has built a large following on social media by posting videos about his stool collection and used furniture finds. He has become a celebrity, for better or worse, to the staff at the local HomeGoods in Danbury.
“Employees come to me right away,” he said. “Oh my god, I can't come here every day. They're going to arrest me.”
