The Wearable Towel: A $20 Towel with Arm Holes, Because Apparently Wrapping a Towel Around Yourself Was an Unsolvable Problem

The infomercial opens in black and white — the universal As-Seen-On-TV signal for "the before times, when life was terrible." A woman exits a shower. She reaches for a towel. She wraps it around herself. The towel... falls. She wraps it again. It falls again. She is fighting the towel. The towel is winning. She looks at the camera with the expression of a person who has been defeated by a rectangle of cotton — the most basic textile operation in human history has been presented as an unsolvable engineering challenge.

Then: color. A different woman exits a shower. She puts on the Wearable Towel — a towel with arm holes cut into it. She slides her arms through. The towel stays on. She is free. She is empowered. She can walk. She can cook. She can answer the door. She can live her LIFE without the crushing burden of a towel that requires wrapping.

The Wearable Towel is a towel with arm holes. That's the innovation. That's the patent. That's the product. Arm holes. In a towel. The same modification you could make to any towel using scissors, a box cutter, or the keys to your apartment if you were desperate enough. Two cuts. Two holes. The $20 product is $0.30 of scissor work applied to a towel you already own.

But the infomercial is committed to the bit. The infomercial needs you to believe that wrapping a towel — a skill mastered by most humans before they can tie their shoes — is a problem so severe that it requires a $20 purpose-built garment to solve. The actors struggle with regular towels the way normal people struggle with flat-pack furniture. The towels fall. The actors sigh. The black-and-white misery continues until the Wearable Towel arrives in a burst of color and the towel-wrapping nightmare ends.

A bathrobe does the same thing. A bathrobe has been doing the same thing since bathrobes were invented. A bathrobe has arm holes, a belt, a collar, and pockets. The Wearable Towel has arm holes. Just arm holes. A bathrobe is the Wearable Towel with every feature the Wearable Towel forgot.

The Glorious User Experience

Jen from Tampa, FL — ★☆☆☆☆

"I received the Wearable Towel as a gift from someone who watches a lot of late-night television. I put it on. It's a towel. With arm holes. My arms go through and the towel hangs from my shoulders like a terrycloth poncho. I look like a person wearing a towel, because I AM a person wearing a towel. The arm holes do not transform the experience. I am not liberated. I am damp, in a towel with holes in it, and I own a bathrobe that does this better. One star."

Tom from Chicago, IL — ★☆☆☆☆

"I watched the infomercial and my wife asked me to pause it. She picked up a regular bath towel. She wrapped it around herself. It stayed. She looked at me. She said, 'Is wrapping a towel hard for you?' I said no. She said, 'Then why are we watching this commercial?' She unpaused the commercial. We watched the actor fail to wrap a towel for thirty more seconds. My wife said, 'That woman is doing it wrong on purpose.' She was correct. The commercial required incompetence to create demand. One star."