Keith: In 1997, our household had simply moved again house from Boise, Idaho the place I used to be working for an advert company. Someday, my daughter positioned a Beanie Child on my shoulder and I observed the way it hugged me. My first thought was to think about a blanket stuffed with these little beans. It could be “the blanket that hugs you again,” which is now our registered trademark. I requested my spouse to make a toddler dimension prototype to point out round to our neighbors with children. Nobody favored it. It was too heavy. I remembered a good friend of ours who’s a particular wants instructor telling me that she used to hug the children with autism and sensory processing dysfunction in her class to calm them down. I gave her the prototype to check out. She got here again the subsequent day saying she wanted extra. From that second on, I knew weighted blankets have been going to be enormous. I discovered a producer right here in Los Angeles and began making them. We known as our new enterprise The Unique Beanie Blanket Firm however Ty Company, the maker of the Beanie Infants, despatched us a Stop and Desist letter, so we known as it the Unique Bean Blanket Firm. That’s our authorized identify to this present day. We offered our first blanket in 1998 to a good friend we made in Boise, Idaho.
Bevoya: Previously decade or so weighted blankets have turn out to be extremely well-liked. As somebody who has watched the advertising and marketing cycle unfold, what has shocked you concerning the reputation of weighted blankets?
Keith: Truthfully, I used to be not shocked by their reputation. What did shock me was that it took so lengthy. Understanding that we had a market throughout the autism and sensory processing dysfunction communities, we began advertising and marketing our weighted blankets to OTs in 1998. Round that point, I had utilized for a patent alone for the design of a weighted blanket, nevertheless it was denied. By the early 2000s, as OTs began to get the phrase out about weighted blankets, there have been a few mothers with particular wants children who additionally began making and promoting them. Slowly, over the subsequent decade, weighted blankets remained a cottage trade, however there was rising consciousness. By round 2014, the mass media began catching on. We have been featured in Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Dr. Oz, Wall Avenue Journal, USA Immediately and others. It was round that point, I used to be in a position to give up my common job and concentrate on the household enterprise. Then, in 2017, we have been interviewed by Time Journal for his or her 2017 invention of the 12 months award. After listening to about our journey from inventing a brand new product and changing into a pacesetter in a distinct segment group, we have been certain we’d be featured. However alas, no. The award went to the Gravity Weighted Blanket which had damaged the file on Kickstarter for elevating probably the most cash for a begin up. By that point, we had been in enterprise for nearly 20 years. With the award, they acknowledged that Gravity didn’t invent the weighted blanket, however that they introduced it to the mass market. From 2017 on, weighted blankets exploded, as did our enterprise. However with that media consideration got here an outpouring of competitors, now acquiring their weighted blankets from China, like Gravity did, and the costs for weighted blankets dropped to a stage that has made it very arduous for a US producer like us to compete. So now, as an alternative of simply attempting to promote The Magic Weighted Blanket, I’m attempting to promote the one one that has been there all alongside, The Weighted Blanket Man.
