Every question, answered.

That's the shape it was made for. A rolled arm is crowned padding with no flat spot, so anything narrow balances instead of standing. The wide flexible base spreads across the curve, the fins grip the drink by its bottom inch, and when an elbow rocks it, it resists tipping and settles back.

The arm changes angle with the chair — which is exactly what defeats rigid trays and caddies. The base flexes with the surface it's sitting on, holds the drink steady through the motion, and settles at the new angle. Moving, uneven surfaces are its home terrain, not its exception.

Check the bottom, not the top. A base 2 to 3 inches across fits — the 40 oz Stanley does; its base was tapered for cup holders. Handled mugs don't: the handle sits where the fins need to grip.

The honest answer: the handle is the one thing this can't hold — it lands right in the fins' grip. The same tea settles in fine in a camp mug with no handle, or in a double-wall tumbler. The mug stays for the desk; the chair gets the cup without the handle.

No. No flap under the cushion, no clamp on the arm, no wedge in the gap — the parts that keep falling off the other fixes don't exist here. It sits on top of the arm, the cushion, or the ottoman, and lifts away in one hand.

Both. It works at least as well on hard, flat surfaces — the wide footprint and the fin grip keep a bumped drink from skating — so it can hold the ottoman during the game and the desk the rest of the week.

A dog landing on the cushion is just the surface re-sloping, and riding that out is what the base is for — it resists tipping and settles the drink back. Keep honest expectations for a paw planted squarely in the cup; no holder survives that. The ordinary traffic of a shared chair is another matter, and it's exactly what this was shaped for.

Yes. A chair that moves by design is still a soft, shifting surface, and that's what the base is shaped for. It rides the motion on the arm or beside your hip — so the water is right there for the one hand you have free.

Rinse it in the sink or run it through the dishwasher. It's one piece of flexible material — no pockets, no seams, nothing to come apart.

It's called the Steadi, molded in small runs in Orange, California by Steadi Labs — veteran-founded and patent pending. It ships free from steadilabs.com, and you get 30 days to change your mind.

It's one piece of molded material with no springs, hinges, or fabric flap to fatigue — the flex lives in the fins themselves, not in a mechanism that can work loose or snap. There's nothing to disassemble and nothing hidden that fails first.

It only touches the outside of whatever's in it, never the drink itself, so a hot cup of tea and a cold, sweating can both just rest against the container's exterior. That's also why it doesn't leave the ring on the chair arm a sweating can leaves on bare fabric or leather — the base takes the moisture, and it rinses or wipes clean.

Yes. The aftermarket caddies fail worst on leather, where a tuck-in flap has less fabric friction to grip and works loose faster than on cloth upholstery. This doesn't attach to anything — it rests its wide base on the arm or the cushion, so there's no flap pulling at the leather and nothing to work loose.

It pairs naturally with any single chair that doesn't already solve this — a new recliner, a wingback in a reading nook, a nursery glider. It arrives ready to use with nothing to install, ships free, and comes in muted colors sized to sit quietly next to whatever chair it's landing in.

Most households use one per chair — it moves easily between the arm, the cushion, and the ottoman depending on what you're holding, so a single one covers a whole evening in one seat. If more than one chair in the room gets regular use — a recliner and a glider, say — it's worth having one for each instead of carrying it back and forth.

Often, yes. Universal replacement recliner cup holders run about 3 3/8 to 3 1/2 inches inside, wider than most cups and tumblers actually need — big tumblers end up perched on the rim instead of seated, and a handled cup usually doesn't fit at all. Setting the base on the console or the arm next to that built-in ring, instead of in it, gives a wide tumbler or a handled cup somewhere that actually grips.

Yes — the footprint doesn't depend on the arm's overall width, only on finding a few inches of it to rest across. A deeply rolled arm just means more curve for the base to drape over. A tufted or buttoned arm is the one texture worth knowing about, since a button directly under the base can tilt it the same way it would tilt anything else set on top of it.

Yes, and that's the point of a wide, flexible base instead of a narrow ring: the container doesn't need to be lined up precisely, because the fins take hold of its bottom inch from the sides once it's roughly centered. It's built for exactly the moment a nursing parent or anyone with one free hand needs it — a cup or bottle that seats without a careful, two-handed placement.