Designing the next evolution of a bed that redefined how people sleep.
During my time there, Eight Sleep was a series-C startup that was 4 years old with about 50 employees, all in-person in NYC until COVID, after which the company transitioned to remote. Eight’s primary product is the Pod, the world’s first automatic, temperature-controlled, sleep-tracking bed.
As Eight’s first designer, I helped build a multidisciplinary design function, aligning digital product, brand, print, packaging, design systems, and hardware to execute against an ambitious product roadmap, during critical series-C growth and a COVID pandemic that proved particularly challenging for a hardware company.
During my time there, Eight Sleep was a series-C startup that was 4 years old with about 50 employees, all in-person in NYC until COVID, after which the company transitioned to remote. Eight’s primary product is the Pod, the world’s first automatic, temperature-controlled, sleep-tracking bed.
As Eight’s first designer, I helped build a multidisciplinary design function, aligning digital product, brand, print, packaging, design systems, and hardware to execute against an ambitious product roadmap, during critical series-C growth and a COVID pandemic that proved particularly challenging for a hardware company.
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We recently launched Pod Pro, the most innovative and advanced sleep system ever designed. Pod Pro builds on the technology pioneered in the award-winning Pod, adding improved comfort, a vibrating wake up experience, and more.
Over several months, I helped coordinate our hardware, product, and brand design efforts to design the next evolution of the Pod: CMF (colors, materials, and finishes), labels, packaging, and the onboarding/unboxing experience. This cross-functional product design process meant the app-based product UX and the physical product are cut from the same on-brand cloth.
For the new Pod we looked to the strength of the Eight Sleep brand: our monochrome, dark aesthetic. This direction better conveys the bed’s powerful capabilities and positions it better as a high-end product.Now, the bed’s exterior matches the brand’s promise and the strength of its internal engineering.
As Naoto Fukasawa famously said, industrial design is interaction design, but with objects as the interfaces. When it comes to smart objects, and particularly health-tech devices like the Pod, this is true in many more ways than one.
For a smart bed like ours, the combination of materials (like CertiPUR-US®-certified foam, premium fabrics, etc.) and smart technology is more than the sum of its parts. Before we can track sleep or control temperature, its UX starts with its success as a traditional bed.Then, we build on top of that foundation with everything that makes a Pod a Pod. A skin of fabric conceals a nervous system of multiple sensors and a circulatory system that moves heated and cooled water through the bed’s surface.
When it came to redesigning the Pod, top of mind was avoiding a common perception from incumbents: that beds can't be exciting, sexy, powerful technology products. The first Pod's gray wasn't conveying these brand values and having developed new technology, we needed a new aesthetic to make that innovation visible.
Our design team, including myself, Alex Zatarain (VP of Marketing), Jisoo Sim (brand designer), Marc-Aurélien Vivant (industrial designer), and Paras Kansra (textile design engineer), spent countless hours developing the aesthetic for what we then called “Pod 2” (eventually, “Pod Pro”)—the successor to the original Pod and Eight’s second product after the Pod (1)’s breakout success.
A lot had changed from a design standpoint since the first Pod, and we wanted to ensure the second would align with what our customers had come to expect from the brand.
Various team members led design exercises, from developing industrial design moodboards and conducting CMF sample reviews for the Hub (the technology device that powers the mattress component of the Pod), to textile and foam testing, to typography tests for the mattress encasement’s embroidery (which would match the type treatment used across other product branding).
Several changes from the first Pod set a new tone. First, everything was made darker to align better with the brand image, from the mattress cover’s very dark charcoal (almost black), to the Hub’s matching front textile and “space gray”-esque plastic. We also chose to make the Hub water tank’s handle a mirrored finish.
The new Pod is sleek, urbane, and sophisticated. The dark color better aligns with the brand aesthetic and the concepts of sleep and sports/fitness.
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