Sometimes ‘it’s not easy being green’, and a little help is needed to make our living space or office cubicle greener and cleaner without much maintenance. Enter the ‘techno-organic’ Grobal planter, a super-stylish self-watering planter that is a foolproof way to grow plants and flowers without day-to-day watering or green-thumb know-how. Invented by Treg Bradley and designed with the high-gloss biomorphism of superstar Karim Rashid, Grobal is ideal for cultivating house plants, flowers, herbs, orchids, and succulents. Let the internal ‘grow chamber’ do the work, and you can sit back and nurture yourself and your plants in self-sufficient, eco-style.
Each Grobal egg-shaped vessel is made from a durable high-gloss plastic, available in a range of pop-art colors (see the line-up below). The easily accessible “grow chamber” draws water and nutrients from the reservoir below into the soil in the top chamber. Each Grobal kit comes with a DIY greening system: the Grobal self-watering planter, Grobal soil, 3 – Grobal ‘plant food hydropaks’ and simple, illustrated, full-color instructions. You can easily transplant your favorite house plant, carnivorous plant, succulent or just about any other plant you like into the Grobal planter. Maintenance simply entails adding water through the ‘Nutriport’ into the reservoir when the water level indicator reaches the lower line as well as feeding your plant with the contents of one Grobal plant food hydropak. The groovy Grobal watering system does the rest.
“The Grobal originated from an ambition to create a techno-organic base for nurturing life and cultivating growth. The digital age we live in no longer accepts the semantics of ancient craft and demands multi-sensorial experiences – any object we bring in our house should be an expression of our modern being and development. The iconic egg-like object functions as the foundation for new life – it is a material visualization of digital and sensual technology and nature synthesizing.” – Karim Rashid
We think that Grobal is a great alternative to the breakable Easter egg or the tackier Chia pet. It is not every day that you get to collect a Karim Rashid design object and green with it, too!
The 7″ Grobal sells for $19.95 and the Baby Grobal at 4.5″ sells for $13.95.
+ Grobal self-watering planter kit
It sounds quite horrific in Russian, where “grob” stands for “coffin”.
with the number of houseplants that get killed off from neglect every year, it’s kind of surprising that this hasn’t already been invented, really.
but how are we going to be able to tell anymore if our new love interest is responsible, reliable, and nurturing? his plants water themselves! no fair.
Great idea… but I much prefer a more organic material for the planter.
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I love the idea but ideas dont have to face reality, some plants need watering ever day while other’s sparingly, food and sunlight vary along with temperature for each species. I dont think applying a kind of H2O “battery” to all plants will work very efficiently however it might for some plants. Also I am very disappointed in the material choice for this product, I’ve heard Karim speak before and this just seems to reflect the disconnect he seems to have between his design philosophy and the end products. All in all i’d buy one if it wasn’t so ugly
plastic… more plastic, until when? is this “eco-desing’ because you can plant something there? please… is this going to end up in a land fill? or in the “great pacific garbage patch”?? why don’t you use your creativity to improve the way people live… plants besides water they need love, why do you want to try al least to take care of your plants yourself, maybe they can inspire you to do something more coherent with the world.
it would be even better if it’s made of bio-degradable material. I am sure it can be made, then it will be a true “green” product!
I got to plastic and went \\\”eh.\\\” I think there are better uses for talent and green ideas than inventing something made of plastic materials and that does not really improve a green activity like planting. The worst case of killing a plant? Trying again. Revamp something that has bigger consequences and use better accountability.