Ep 592: $250K Kickstarter to West Elm: How Bearaby Built a Weighted Blanket Category (Without Early Meta Spend)

0:00So we developed a set of machines that can do the chunky yarn. And then we had five people in a small garage knitting. Like our first batch was 800 blankets. And in my calculation was like, okay, 800 blankets should last me like a year, one and a half years. They were sold out after two weeks. In the first like nine months, we didn't do any like paid performance marketing. We just went out and gifted a lot of blankets to editors who wrote about sleep products, people in the sleep space. That just also informed our identity along the way. We didn't have a lot of marketing dollars, so how can you be clever?

0:45Dr. Kathrin Hamm:This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof? When your outside-of-the-box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers, it's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. Welcome to the D2C podcast, Dr. Katherine Hamm. We don't often have a doctor on the podcast. You are a doctor of economics. Is that what it is?

1:24Yeah, economics.

1:25Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Very cool. Well, welcome. How are you doing? Doing well. I'm excited to be on the pod. I'm a big fan. Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'm a big fan of your blanket. You sent me a Barabee weighted blanket, and I got to say, my daughter is a huge, huge fan of it. We've had weighted blankets before. What I like about Barabee is it's like the second wave of weighted blanket. We're going to get into that a little bit, but maybe start with the why. Why did you build Barabee? So, I mean, as I mentioned, I'm an economist. I have a PhD in economics. I'm one of the people who studied for a very long time. So didn't initially have any intention on quitting my job once I had landed one at the World Bank as an economist.

2:04I'm like, wasn't my first idea. but I had sleep issues so I was just transferred started my career in Washington and moved to India and I was always a light sleeper and at that point I just really kind of it got worse and worse wake up multiple times at night couldn't fall back asleep at night and at that point just I did a lot of research looking kind of what are like sleep solutions like natural sleep solutions that are out there and I stumbled more or less stumbled across like weighted blankets because as you mentioned there has been a first wave of weighted blankets around actually like more than 30 years in the medical niche so you could find them in a you know in a pharmacy and you know I was kind of had tried a lot of different things and at that point like weighted blankets were more positioned for children, like children with sensory needs, children with anxiety.

3:04But there was like in some medical articles, they already mentioned that the same like weight, like an evenly distributed weight on your body can help adults sleep better. And I'm like, why not give it a try? And so I ordered one of these blankets in a German pharmacy. And like six weeks later, I get one of these massive bean bags like kind of the orange blue with all these little like plastic beads in it and I mean didn't look like a sleep product at all not something that you want to keep on your couch or that you want to keep like on your bed but I tried it and it was like the single best thing I've ever tried so it absolutely worked for me I put it on my body I passed out five minutes later and I took a four hour nap kind of you know when you wake up after nap and you don't know who you are and so it was really like this this concept of weight really worked for me where you could just see it also on your sleep tracker like my sleep cycles became more regular had more long longer deep sleep and so that was kind of the initial how I got into the product but then like after using it for why you realize all the shortcomings because then looking back at it and even it has been around for very long time nobody had really innovated anything it has been this beanbag styles in 30 years it was always in that medical niche so what happened is it made me really hot imagine if you sleep under 15 20 pounds of plastic it just kind of it's not something that works for the long term and then I started kind of crafting a little bit outside of work and researching and like literally there was no product like this out there and so that's kind of made me intrigued but at the same time it was not easy because I was like how big is this category you know like no one had done something like this when you look at other D2C products like toothbrush or socks you have a rough estimate like you know who are the big players in the market what's the market size and I knew kind of if I wanted to do it I had to create like a whole new category and I also had to come up with like a new better product so there were like two challenges and it took me quite some time to like get into it but then like my first step was launching a Kickstarter campaign so I quit my job I took like$120 ,000 that I had for my retirement savings and put that all in a Kickstarter campaign and I think that's like we launched like in October and like in November we had already like$250 ,000 and like huge excitement around the product and And I think that's like this first proof point where I'm like, aha, there is something, there is some market, there is some demand.

5:52And you start understanding also who are actually the people like outside of me who are looking for such a product because there was no market research besides like these initial proof points that I had developed through this initial Kickstarter campaign.

6:06Dr. Kathrin Hamm:I just had a question because when my daughter was using it, she was like, she was noticing how breathable the blanket. You mentioned previous weighted blankets. I've used previous weighted blankets. You wake up and your face feels all pressed or you're, it isn't the best feeling, but the way you've built yours, it's incredibly breathable with it being these big chunky. Did you know how you wanted to solve the form factor like pretty early on? Or was that something that sort of came to you in a spark of genius? No, I did like lots of like trial and errors. And basically, like, I think the insight was that, as you say, like the beads don't solve anything.

6:43but when you have like natural fibers and you mix like just natural fibers in a chunky yarn and like a layered yarn you get like a very weighted product or heavy product that you can customize no matter how heavy you want it you can go up to like you know 30 40 pounds but at the same time you take the beads out you just have natural fibers and it is breathable right so air just naturally circulates and it took like these main issues out or like the number one issue that people have is like that the weighted blanket makes them hot and the beads are also when they're shifting it's not evenly distributed like it's noisy and so we took all of that by just creating this chunky yarn we took all of that out and I think that's also one of the reasons when I then moved into D2C later like my initial customer group 50 % when we did a survey was people who had a previous weighted blanket and they upgraded to a bearer bee blanket so we had kind of that was our initial marketing was just having a better product but yeah it was kind of a lot of trial and errors until we got to that construction and then also filing and patent for it a second issue that we had to solve with the with the production right i mean now when you look at again bigger categories that are already established you can just go to a third party manufacturer and say like well i want something with some customizations but um for me when i went with like a small knitted blanket so had my initial prototype that we had created and everyone said well I've never seen something like this like I don't have the machine for it like we don't have the fabrics we don't have the people to do it and also you don't have a proof on yes we had a successful kickstarter campaign but that's about it so we developed a set of machines that can do the chunky yarn and then we had five people in a small garage knitting like our first batch was I believe it was 800 blankets and in my calculation was like, okay, 800 blankets should last me like a year, one and a half years, you know, like taking it really slowly so we can figure things out.

8:45And they were sold out after two weeks. That was the second proof point when I knew, okay, there is really a lot of demand for the product. And then now we had to figure out how to scale.

8:56Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Such a smart category because it takes, like you say, 50 % of the people were buying a better weighted blanket, but it also has such a strong visual appeal that anyone seeing it who didn't even know they needed a weighted blanket would see the blanket and be like, oh, that just looks like an amazing blanket. So I bet it probably bridges away from the sort of clinical use case into more of a lifestyle play at the same time, which is a much bigger audience. And it's great to have both of those. You have your foot firmly in the problem aware anxiety blanket market, but then also anyone else who sees it could be like, oh, this could just make my life better.

9:30Definitely. I mean, like I knew from the beginning, which was nice to have like this natural inflow of people who are upgrading to a Barabee. But then we needed to build a category from scratch. And for that, when we did our branding exercise, we were like, OK, we need to get into a lifestyle segment. We need to kind of educate people. What is a weighted blanket and why they should use it? What are like the benefits for it? And then obviously you can't achieve that if you have these. a lot of people on twitter say mental illness gray like there was this hashtag like for weighted blankets so we were very colorful at the beginning so we have the chunky knit it already looks good but then when we chose like how we designed the website and the ux we were you know we had like obviously the traditional home decor colors but a lot of pink yellow purple so really like just the opposite of like this medical position you would see but we really lean into lifestyle lifestyle we were looking what are the trend colors out there that people are not keeping on their bedroom but what is like couch worthy something that you're proud showing off people coming visiting your home going into a living room where there's like this beautiful blanket and like a stunning pink or like a stunning purple and i think that was something we definitely leaned in making lots of different shades and colors that really popped and i think that's like so we were D2C for five months and then we already had our first inbound from retail from West Elm and they were also they were like we were looking for years into like this category and like nothing strikes like you know Williams-Sonoma the Pottery Barn West Elm home decor aesthetic but then we're looking at dual blankets and they really fit that's something we want to showcase and then I remember the story when they wanted to come to our showroom and we were still you know like a couple of people in a garage making blankets so we took like 300 pounds of blankets into dumbo where they have the headquarter in brooklyn and uh just kind of like wheeled the blankets in and they loved them and we had our first purchase orders and were in their stores and that got us like these early proof points where people are like okay if this is at west helm and there was another thing is obviously like you cannot only say a weighted blanket but we had to have like explainer so we had with west salmon even then later when we expanded two years later into nordstrom whenever we have like this the display we have a couple of descriptions of what a weighted blanket does what are the statistics of science behind it so that's kind of where we when we're in a design or like in a lifestyle point we're trying to merge the medical point uh with it so explaining people because when you walk by and you're just touching it you're like why is this so heavy so we've gotten a lot of like you know education around that but um yeah i think the the visual and that kind of leaning into that another point was also how do you do partnerships you know what are like unexpected fun clever partnerships that you don't expect from a weighted blanket i remember early on into covid and everyone was like at home we partnered with a popsicle brand and we created like a set of like weighted blankets in popsicle colors and we delivered a package with popsicles to people's home in the summer when it was hot.

12:45And people realized, okay, I can use that actually also in July, in August, I can sleep under it. I don't get hot and I can eat a popsicle with it or we did a Shake Shack partnership last year. So just kind of trying really to push the boundaries and don't see ourselves in that niche of medical. but like how do we get out into like medical and finding like brands that people are resonating that are maybe not in a sleep brand, but really like positioning a lifestyle brand. And we did that very early on.

13:16Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Super smart. And like Popsicle too is such a nostalgic brand as well. And I wanted to actually even back all the way up to your brand name for a second, because I think it's doing a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot going on in Barabee. And maybe from my armchair psychologist perspective, you've got like the comforting aspect of like a teddy bear. It sounds a little bit like therapy. So it sounds like therapeutic. It's also like bear, like you're bearing a weight a little bit. Is that all going on there in the brand name Bearby? How did you come up with it? The original name is like bear hug and lullaby combined.

13:48But it actually like I was at the beginning experimenting with different like ideas, what is related to sleep. And then like when the early customer testimonials came in, like the word bear hug, it's like people always describe like it feels like people, like someone is giving me a hug or people would write on the gift notes, I'm sending you a hug. And so we're like, okay, it just, we need to bring the word like bear and hug in it. And then comes the lullaby, something that softly, like gently, like melts you into sleep. And then obviously you go through all the other categories. Like, is the brand name already taken?

14:24is that when I Google it, is there something comparable to it? And I think we got lucky that there was no comparable name out there. And we also registered a trademark for it early on.

14:36Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Was there anything with your Kickstarter? So like, was it really just having a great product that people really can visually recognize as different? Was there a reason that you credit it taking off initially on Kickstarter, just having nailed the brand and the form factor? I think Kickstarter is still like an audience where you get like attention with like a niche product where people are into the science, people are into new things. And again, that was like 2017. So a lot of people wouldn't know what a weighted blanket was. so even like if we would have put up a website and then we had to would let's say we would have run like regular Facebook ads I think it would have been much more difficult if you get this initial traction with an audience that is like you know what is this what is this category but I think with Kickstarter where you have like people who are a bit geeky who are kind of like always like a bit ahead of the game looking for like the latest product I think having like that right audience i would still like use if i had like another product that is like you know where you want to create like a new category i think kickstarter is like still a great launch pad and you can just have like long-form storytelling you can have a video where you explain like you know what the product is made of without having to invest too much so i think it was just the right thing for us for me at the beginning it's also like i had to get into i'm not i don't have a marketing background so running ads getting into seo and all like the good things you have to do as a d2c brand that heavy lifting went away so that's why kickstarter made sense and then a secondary step you have a bit money you can do a little bit on brand identity really think it through get some people who know what they're doing on brand identity that was like step two and then obviously a lot of gifting i think just for like category building like being prepared But especially if you don't have a lot of marketing dollars, but you have like maybe expensive PR agency or other like bigger like budgets.

16:33We just went out and gifted a lot of blankets to editors who wrote about sleep products, people in the sleep space. And then you would get just natural conversions where people just love the product and they give you a tag on Instagram or they give you a static on Instagram or they write about you. so in the first like nine months we didn't do any like paid performance marketing we just kind of naturally did our gifting um and uh basically being relying that naturally people find uh find the product later on we we said like how can we take this to the next level and we did the netflix uh netflix gifting i don't know if you've seen on our on our web page you would see a couple of placements so we were on the sex in the city sequel we were in murders in the house just kind of a lot of things and that doesn't like now i'm giving away a secret doesn't cost us anything but there are a lot of like set designers of netflix shows or you know any other shows who just need product to decorate the show and sometimes you can really hit it out of the park and you even get your product integrated and we did that consistently like over the years and now you You would see, I mean, at the beginning when there was weighted blankets, like maybe five years ago, you would still see the old design.

17:51And out like recent shows, you would always see our design. And so that's also in the mind of people kind of now when people talk about weighted blankets, even in memes, the knitted weighted blanket comes up. And so kind of getting your design to the forefront, making a part of the culture, even if it's just like sitting there on the couch, there was like the beast in me. There was no like storyline in it, but like it wasn't Claire Dane's home. and you just see kind of like spark and then you have like again these memorable colors like a very strong green and then it's kind of people can recognize that and it's just like builds and and i think that is something like it's free marketing and you can do that along the way so i think that just also informed our identity along the way we didn't have a lot of marketing dollars so how can you be clever without putting a lot of you know dollars early on into Facebook or Meta.

18:42Dr. Kathrin Hamm:The form factor stands alone. How did you, did you find the people who were making the set decisions and add them and send the product? Or how did you actually make the Netflix, you know, relationship come about? I mean, I think when you're like in the scene, like you, and you do your research and that's all I did at the beginning. I was like, okay, who are like people in the space that we can like educate and gift about the product? And so I had like the different pillars. So I wanted to like know the sleep audience, right? So there's Matthew Walker and like, people who've written like books and who are like really well known and like that authority so that was my first pillar where like i want to convince people who already like deep into sleep who probably already tried a weighted blanket so they were like very easy to convert and then the second was like the design people so i was looking at people who are interior designers people who design sets for architectural digest and there's a lot of overlap people who are like designing for httv these are usually like the same crowd where at some point someone said well have you ever considered putting a product on netflix i'm like no it's too expensive for us i know someone who knows someone so looking into like who's your audience first it was interior designers and then there's kind of like again word of mouth i think that's the most important thing if people the gifting strategy doesn't work if people don't love the product right if you have to push them but if you give a product and then you get the email people just i love it and i recommended it to five other people and you're in the right circle.

20:08And then, so we got very popular also in the design community and then just naturally showed up. And that's how we got the Netflix community. And then we got like four or five contacts for doing the majority of the set designs for these different Netflix shows. And now they just send us an email saying, you have a pink blanket. I'm like, sure, send it over. And then we are always happy when we see placements 18 months, a year later.

20:31Dr. Kathrin Hamm:So you set a great organic base. You have a great gifting strategy. You have this awesome Netflix influencer. What was your next sort of move to scale it up? I know you guys have, because you've been around so long, you've expanded into Europe. You've done all sorts of, so many interesting partnerships at this point. What was your move maybe after, you know, at what point, I guess, did you start getting into paid ads? So I think then like once you do kind of the initial like brand building moments, I think then you just have to do the classic D2C playbook and you have to do it really well. I think that's also what we learned over the years how ads are changing and kind of like meta is changing I think just kind of building that up as like you're getting obviously you're setting up your email flows you optimize your website and kind of you're getting through the classical t2c playbook and you're scaling at the same time we build out our amazon and getting like step by step into like the different channels but we were really intentional so before I went into kind of a channel i tried to always like lean in with the product so we had like one skew and then early on we got demand for kid sizes so we built out all the different sizes and we realized there's a second layer of people who are really sleeping hot so we needed a different fabrication so we came up with like tensile fabrics which is like a tree it's made from wood pulp so it's a very cooling silky but also sustainable fabric so i had all like the different product categories i built first and again from this early customer feedback from hardcore fans of people like who are like weighted blanket users and kind of just building out this and then going into like the different channels and i think then organically if you have a good product you're naturally like scaling and you're adding up like different skews and like different customer groups you learn you get to customers know better you have queen king sizes you're building all of that and just like naturally like last year we were like okay i mean the market leader in the u.s we've hit all the major retailers we've been on amazon so you're getting into like a steady growth where it like feels good so we're like okay where can we what can we do next and then i think my vision is still i want to barely be kind of if you are in hong kong if you're in japan if you're in australia i want when you have here weigh the blanket i would want your barry to come to your mind first so building like that international brand so for us to make a decision like what's next and we were looking into europe i'm from from germany so it's not that that's why we went into germany it also there was like a lot of like analysis on why it makes sense so that was our next kind of gross move on just taking our core product where people actually already knew us because of like people also in the u.s watch netflix people read the new york times people read wire cutter so all the work you've done in the u.s when you are like the leading spot i think that's the nice thing like it's not always easy building a niche and building a category or small in like being in a niche category but once you kind of like own that category you're very recognizable it makes it much easier to go into markets that like already consume u.s media so there were obviously a couple of tweaks that we had to do in in germany germany has a lot of print press for example like long lead takes three to six months uh less digital like less digital press heavy a lot of like more education again needed like lots of medical newsletters medical journals testing like not like mattress testing sites but actually testing institute that have their own um so again when we went there we had to some form create again the category from scratch did a lot of gifting and that always helps when you have a good product just people kind of gravitate to it and then like but for example like convincing again people well why haven't you looked into weighted blankets i saw you reviewing pillows and mattresses what about weighted blankets well i never heard about this category and i'm like okay let me educate you so we started this with germany austria and Switzerland last year and opened up basically everything besides UK to scale there further and yeah now we're taking kind of like another approach where we're scaling Europe we're looking into UK as another market next but then now I think we're also in a phase where we're like okay we have like the weighted blanket category and over the years we got so many like again requests from customers and other products they want to see from us or like also ideas that we see as a founder kind of we're like heavy in manufacturing you travel a lot you see a lot in factories you're like oh that would be nice i haven't seen that in the u.s market we went into sheets for example at the end of last year we realized a lot of our customers that buy weighted blankets that have insomnia anxiety also have pain and like skin health issues so we're like what are like hypoallergenic sheets and we found like a nice manufacturer in Portugal that weaves in peppermint which kills 99.9 percent of bacteria so it's like people who have eczema people who have acne or just people who really want to have clean sheets so we're looking for like again like categories with like a functional twist on it I wouldn't want to put out a product that is like just a cotton sheet yes we can do a high quality uh sheet but what is again like a functional angle that helps complement like the sleep system and i think that's something i'm enjoying uh right now so we've built a nice design team last year building that out further and see like okay what where can we push the envelope not only on like functional but also like additional like products that feel very homey cozy and bring like that level of comfort to people.

26:30So like building out additional product categories, building that muscle right now with the team in the US market, while at the same time bringing our core product and expanding in other markets has been something we're working on, which keeps me busy.

26:47Dr. Kathrin Hamm:I just released a podcast on Monday about going into Europe and how absolutely essential it is to treat each country or country grouping at the least, you know, separately. You can't think of it monolithically. You guys mentioned one of your stunts going into the German market was creating egg hats. Yes. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it was definitely, I think often D2C brands who are trying to go into like European markets, they go with the English first website or English first way, just dabble a bit to see like, what are my English speaking ads? How far can they get me? Definitely. It's like, it's a, it's a starting point, but to kind of really like crack the market you need to have the language first and there's only certain ways so ai has limitations yes you can translate your seo pages but you have to work with someone who understands the nuances of like how people speak about something when you translate it in english even more so when you have a medical product so having like all these terms right how do we talk about like even like a weighted blanket again the term is like very loosely defined what are the features how you talk about it defining that was like the number one thing that we did and then at the beginning we were also like obviously the beds are smaller in europe so you have to think about that there's no queen and king size in that sense people have two blankets people don't share duvets they have like two blankets so there's like again content things that you have to adjust not only on a product level but just also like how do people sleep differently in germany must save a lot of marriages i never realize that people are not fighting for the blanket as much right exactly i think that's a really neat point you never know when you're going we we worked with uh unilever one time at our agency and we were filming some ugc in our one of our kitchens and they're like this isn't like a british kitchen this kitchen is way too big there's too much light there's you know you need you need so you never know what's going to betray that you're not local in a way right i think of inglorious bastards and three versus three you know you have to make sure you have all that local stuff right Exactly.

28:52Also like the visuals, right? So we usually most of our photos we shoot in Brooklyn, right? You have the Brooklyn brick wall that New Yorkers love. In Europe, people are like, this is not how our homes look like. We have wooden floor, we have white kind of wooden, like larger ceilings. So, I mean, I think that is something you can adjust later. But if you want to get again into architectural magazines, right, into lifestyle, you need to speak their language. Your Brooklyn pictures will only get you that far. but then when it comes to campaigns as i mentioned one of our strategies is like early on finding like clever brand spins and like partnerships so we did like we always like to be humorous also as a brand so we always do april fools so we were like what are we doing like last year for april fools so we partnered in the u.s with like egg influencers so we made an egg shape weighted blankets and we gave it to different farmers who put it on chickens and eggs and we said if you If your chickens sleep under a weighted blanket, the eggs get bigger.

29:51Just as April Fool's. And I was very early on in Germany. We didn't have a big team. So I was like, can we just run the same egg campaign in Germany? And I kind of started floating it with different people. And everyone was so upset. And they're like, this is not funny at all. This concept is not working. and no one like while every one of our American team was like found it hilarious you could just see like Germans were like I mean Germans maybe are not funny in the first place but like just definitely didn't get it and then but what then someone said but well what about like it's Easter coming up and everyone in Germany like obviously coloring the eggs but every Sunday people like put egg warmers like eggheads on their on their eggs and I'm like yeah I remember that growing up that's a very german thing we didn't have a lot of time but then we used our yarn to make just these little egg warmers and like matching colors with the blankets and just around like the easter time we just sent out with a set of like these egg warmers and again that went viral we had manuel neuer who's like the german soccer goalkeeper loving the egg worms and just got again like a lot of hits and virality in the german market with this campaign and i think that was It's just like, again, if you want to get like this impact on the market and go beyond the surface level, like find out what are like these really cultural specificities.

31:20I mean, I don't think anyone in the US puts a little egghead on their four minute egg. But I think people really appreciate it. And then obviously we did a gifting campaign around it. And then like you get more inclusions because people then also feel like you're taking them seriously as a brand. You're not just coming and you want to kind of sell a couple of products, but you're actually building a relationship and you understand them. So I think building up on that and also with local colors. So we just started with supply chain. We make our products in India, but now also started with like some European sourcing with like in Portugal.

31:56and I think kind of just again having like these additional moments where you have a product that is sourced for the European market helped us a lot as well. So Europe has been doing really well for us but yeah, we had to really rethink what we're doing and talking with a lot of people and like getting again in like the habits and think how can we actually be relevant and make sense to people there.

32:20Dr. Kathrin Hamm:You mentioned meta having changed and that's a theme on this podcast that we've talked about since the past six years that we've been doing it. I remember it was like six years ago, we used to say creative is the new targeting. And we used to say that all the time. And it's like now with Andromeda, it like very, very much is that that is the case. I'm curious, I know you're high level in the company, but from your perspective, what's changed about Meta as a growth engine for a brand like yours? I mean, for us, definitely like the role of the creative strategist has become important. We didn't have one before.

32:52And then last year we brought on a full-time role for creative strategists just to come up with like different ad angles. And I think just not only the volume, like in terms of like that you need to have like more creative volume, but also just the creative diversity. And I think once you have a marketing team or even with an agency at some point, there's just so many like angles you can do. so bringing in some fresh ideas with like an in-house team but then also like instead of having one media buying agency that kind of does the creative we're now working with more specialized agencies that help us with content and just like having regular shoots creating like different angles more fresh takes on it so creative diversity has been like a big one for us where really we had to put our heads together and see like okay how do you get from 40 ads to 900 ads and like without them looking the same and like again having a fresh angle different getting through all the customer personas so really digging deep into building out the customer personas and updating them and making sure that everyone in the team understands we have Michael is one of our customer personas he's a stressed out professional like in his mid-40s so when you wake up at night I want you to think about Michael and what are like the things that are relevant for him what is he struggling and obviously like we need to have someone who looks like Michael right instead of the other personas so I think that was like a big one for us on getting to the volume of ads but then also like the quality and the diversity in the content and both getting the in-house team staffed up but then also just having more agencies that are more agile and more shoots

34:34Dr. Kathrin Hamm:you mentioned in our pre-interview some issues with copycats and I imagine when you innovate the form factor of a product so much as you have, there's probably fast followers. How have you, what's been the story with copycats? So the first like two years, you know, when you're the first to market, you don't have any copycats. And then one morning you wake up and you have like, oh wow, that looks a lot like our product. And then kind of like, you know, once you have success, they're always naturally people will follow. So I think for us, like an important lesson was that we have our patents that we filed early on.

35:09One thing is obviously using them. I think we've been, especially you see a lot of copycats, which is really hard to get, like all the Amazon, Alibaba copycats. It's like you shut one thing down and then pop up again. So it's just something you have to keep going. And I think also just being diligent about it. It's just part of like if you're a brand and if you're like a patented brand, it becomes part of your job and like making sure to address it. I think another one is just being innovative. So yes, you can maybe make a polyester product and try to knock off a color within 12 months. But then again, if we have different fabrications, different collections, different partnerships, different sizes, it just kind of makes the team pushing the engine.

36:02So at the beginning, you're like, oh, wow, this is the same product that we have. So what can we do differently? So it's a mix of patent protection. I always tell this funny story when I was in China and I was visiting a factory. And one of them was one of the factories that copied our products. And they had our pictures everywhere. And even my picture there, when they saw it, they're like, oh, we love your product. And I was like, well, we love this color. We love this color. So there was like just a different culture, like, I guess, appreciation also, like maybe not the same level of awareness of like what copying means or infringement means in the US.

36:42So we actually could laugh and even took a group picture afterwards of like the people copying us. But yeah, it's definitely something you're very surprised how quick and nimble they are. Like they're checking your website, you have something new, you can be certain you will be copied within a very short time frame. If you don't have legal protection, definitely trademarks. It's always something like if you see that taking your images, that's something you also can prosecute. And then trying to stay ahead of the game. I guess that's like competition makes us more innovative. I think that's what we had to do.

37:20Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Just keep running. Keep running. I think the peppermint in linens, in bed linens, is such a smart. I'm such a fiend for the cold side of the pillow. Or the cold part of the sheet. And even if Peppermint doesn't do that, it will make me think that Peppermint will make my sheets cooler. Yeah. It does. Actually, it does. Yeah. No, that's super smart. What an awesome suite of products you're building on. How many SKUs do you have now at this point? Lots. Well, if you count the weighted blankets as SKUs, we have like 120 different SKUs just for the weighted blanket. if you count in all the colors, all the sizes, right?

37:56From the different weights, starting at like five pounds for kids, then going up to the king size with 30 pounds. So that's something like I always want people, when they come to our store, you should have all the breadth of the offering, all the colors, all the fabrications that you have. So we want to be that one-stop shop for the knitted weighted blanket. And then obviously then we started adding additional, like we have the warmables which was one of the products like our neck our neck wrap which is made with natural clay so you can just pop it in a microwave for three minutes and it like just is weighted but it's also warm we have our body pillow that is made out of natural like foam of tree foam so I love I'm like a big fan of like using like innovative materials that I find along the way so a couple of years ago in Sri Lanka I found like this farm that takes like tree sap and steams it into like then makes a natural tree foam out of it and it's like this very bouncy foam that makes a great body pillow or pillow and it's non-toxic so it's literally just foam like from a tree that's steamed there are no chemicals in it and it never falls flat and just thinking about what are like these materials and I think now I see myself like now that we're further along in the journey and we have like the weighted blanket like innovated in this like how can we go back and and again take like unexpected spins and not making it too easy and say well let's just take another pillow that's filled with polyester but like what are innovative materials something that you maybe haven't seen in like your category you take it from another category like the peppermint for example but then there haven't been any peppermint sheets so it's just kind of like i think looking right and left and i think a new category or like a niche category often comes from boring different territories and moving them into the edges and then you get like a completely new product and i think that's what i'm also trying to push my design team like don't look at like a bedding company don't look into a mattress company what they're doing but look into another territory like where people came up with very innovative what are like Like we were looking, for example, last week we were studying like a kayak, which is made out of like innovative paper material.

40:17So look at kind of really unexpected categories. A kayak has nothing to do with a weighted blanket, but you will find things and then kind of like taking them into like your new territory. And so we've won now like a lot of like, I think we've won more than five Red Dot Design Awards. We got the Fast Company Innovation Award for like our products. so I think when you kind of push like the envelope and you are thinking about like what can I do new with the custom in mind it will come up naturally with like more products that haven't existed in the market that you can easily then build on because when I was first thinking okay now we have the weighted blanket but we are there was no other weighted blanket company before so I cannot just look like oh yeah when you have a mattress company you have a pillow or you have something else but like how do you actually extend in a meaningful way like the category and what categories make sense when you're here or as you use a weighted blanket again it's nothing that like i can go and check somewhere i have to again reinvent it and build it which is daunting in one end because again we have to always reinvent the wheel but i think in the last years i've also seen there's a lot of like freedom and liberty that comes with it because again no one has done it before so we can again push the envelope we can try something and I love kind of like taking like small steps like working with small scale manufacturers where you can try something new maybe it's not a great product but then like you try it out and you take like these risks but then like maybe for every like fifth product you get a really amazing new product that people are like wow I've never heard about you can use peppermint or you can use tree foam for pillow so that's something that gets me also up every morning and gets me really excited.

42:04Dr. Kathrin Hamm:Good luck, copycats. When you have this much innovation, good luck keeping up. Catherine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's such a cool story. I am going to cherish my Barabee blanket forever, as will my daughter. She took it right onto her bed. We have it on the couch. But when she went to bed, she's like, I need this. And she's had the best sleep of her life. So thank you so much for sending that. I really appreciate it. And if people want to keep up with your journey, where are you active on social platforms like LinkedIn? Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me under Catherine Hamm.

42:33Always happy to connect, exchange views. And then like our website is baraby.com and our socials Instagram is mybaraby.

42:41Dr. Kathrin Hamm:And if you're a listener who has any sleep issues, you've got to go to baraby.com and check out the weighted blankets, the other products you have there. I'm sure there's, I think for better or for worse, anxiety is probably a growth market in the world right now. Specifically, I feel like there's a lot of unsurety kind of out there right now. So I imagine it's a bit of a, for better or for worse, it's a growth industry. For better or for worse.