We launch the idea

It was launched as a lark. It was a super hot summer. We wanted to swim in the river, and didn’t totally know why you couldn’t. Dong asked Archie and Jeff to grab coffee, and talk about an idea he had about a water-filtering, floating pool in the river. We all sat in Dong’s studio on Perry St. in the West Village (thanks Sharon Davis!) for a few weeks, living and breathing the idea. We designed it, branded it, made a website, a zine, a newsprint, and sent it out in the world.

We sent the books and newsprints to a huge amount of people, most of which we didn’t know: Parks and Recreation, the High Line, Michael Bloomberg (never got a response from him), and a bunch of people called us into their office.

When Archie announced the idea on Facebook, our good friend Brian wrote an article about it for PSFK called “The Future of Water Recreation,” and within 48 hours we had thousands of hits at pluspool.com; so many that it crashed. That was the moment we realized this thing may be real.