What to Know
- Brooklyn dad Lance Vining and his 4-year-old son Zach have launched a club that aims to reunite people with their missing gloves
- People can leave gloves they've found or find gloves they've lost at the Lonely Glove Club's "Singles Meet-Up Points"
- Since the club launched, Vining and Zach have mailed more than 30 posters to places as close as Manhattan and as far as Europe
Lance Vining and his son Zach, 4, were walking to school in Windsor Terrace at the beginning of December when Zach noticed a lone glove on the sidewalk.
“He pointed it out and said, ‘Daddy, what happens to the gloves that are just left on the sidewalk?’ I had to say, ‘Well, nothing happens to them,’” Vining told News 4. “‘Because you can’t do anything with a single glove.’”
The answer didn’t sit well with Zach, who looked “crestfallen,” Vining recalled.
A few weeks later, Vining had come up with a better answer to Zach's question — a “Lonely Glove Club” that uses a network of posters to reunite owners with their lost mittens.
After Vining printed and laminated the club’s first posters, he and Zach set out to hang them up around their Brooklyn neighborhood. Passersby were intrigued by the signs almost immediately, he said.
“As we were putting up the signs, people were commenting, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea,’ which was kind of awesome,” Vining said. After the signs were up, Vining launched an Instagram page to document the arrival of new gloves.
When the page started gaining followers, people began asking for signs to put up in their own neighborhoods, Vining said.
Since they started the club in mid-December, Vining and Zach have mailed more than 30 posters to places as close as Manhattan and New Jersey and as far as California, England, France and the Netherlands, Vining said.
Anyone interested in a poster for their own neighborhood can reach out to Vining via Instagram, he noted.
While Vining isn’t sure exactly how many owners have found their lost gloves at the club’s “Singles Meet-Up Points," he and Zach “see new gloves appearing and other gloves disappearing, so it seems to be working,” he said.
He’s also gotten confirmation on Instagram that the club has successfully reunited at least one person with their lost mitten.
“It’s really rewarding to think that such a small, little idea that was supposed to just be for our neighborhood is being so well-received by other places in the world,” he said.
“I guess it’s kind of a universal thing that everybody goes through every winter — we’ve all lost and seen gloves on the side of the road.”
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Vining, who works as a creative director at a company in Manhattan, says the project has given Zach a chance to understand what he does at work.
“This is the kind of thing I do for big brands all the time, so it’s a bit of an insight into my world for him,” he said.
The club has also become “a really cool project” for Vining and his son to work on together, he said.
“I wanted to show him that if you see a problem, you can solve it,” he said. “You don’t have to wait for somebody else to solve it.”
