Russians discover that somewhere in the world there’s a sofa named in their honor

Lifestyle
VICTORIA RYABIKOVA
It turns out that furniture stores and factories often give sofas human names. The latest craze is to find out your sofa alter ego. Are you angular, colorful, or luxurious?

The challenge seemingly began with a tweet from Russian writer Alexander Pelevin, who posted a photo of the “Alexander” sofa. Other tweeters followed suit and posted pics of their own sofa namesakes.

The rules are simple: go to a search engine, key in your name and the word "sofa," find one that fits the bill, take a screenshot, and post it online. Here's what some sofas with human names look like:

"Yaroslav" sofa

"Elina" sofa

The “Boris” sofa (in the words of the eponymous tweeter) is “stylish and majestic.”

The “Asya” sofa sure is cute.

“Viktoria” is rather floral...

And “Maxim” looks like a bench, but a comfy one.

However, some furniture stores were not overjoyed by the sudden popularity of their catalogs. This is because users in search of namesake sofas went berserk clicking on sofa ads. Furniture stores have to pay for these clicks, but they weren’t generating any revenue, just tweets.

Indignant clients of the online shopping aggregator Yandex.Market demanded a refund for “wasted advertising.” To its credit, the site did return the money, describing the situation as a “non-standard incident.”