The Origin of Stoopd

The idea for Stoopd started with a mirror.

My boyfriend was moving into my apartment, and while we were unpacking his things, he mentioned that the giant mirror we were setting up in the closet had a funny story. A friend of ours got it off Facebook Marketplace, and when she met the guy to pick it up, they had instant chemistry and ended up hooking up. Very Sex and the City.

I had totally forgotten about that. I made an offhand comment that I wished there was a way to record an object’s history so these moments aren’t forgotten.

In a city like New York, objects change hands constantly. People move all the time, and Facebook Marketplace has become the default way furniture gets passed from one apartment to the next. But none of that history ever sticks to the object itself. Once it’s out of your hands, the story is gone.

So the idea was simple: give objects a way to hold onto their own story. A code you stick on the back of something, so whoever owns it next can look it up and actually see where it came from, who had it before them, and what happened along the way. Thus, Stoopd.