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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The designs below are concepts that include fake data for illustrative purposes. The names and numbers in these designs are completely made up at random and do not reflect any person, company, or group’s past, present, or future plans. Even where a group or person's name may bear similarity to a real-life group or person, the numbers and other data associated with it are random. Any similarity to real life events are purely coincidental. Nothing contained herein is or should be construed as investment advice, legal advice, solicitation or encouragement to conduct any financial transaction, or an ad for any current or future offering of any token or security.
For most people, the relaxation of sleep is marred by the unpleasantness of an abrupt wake up each morning. Every day, people are quite literally alarmed into wakefulness.
And there’s even less attention paid to helping people fall asleep in the first place. How might we supplement the bed experience with tools to help you fall asleep and wake up gently?
We integrated wake-up as a phase of the sleep journey, positioning our “alarm” alongside sleep phases in a holistic approach to each night.
Apple would later redesign their alarm UI to be focused on time asleep, with sleep schedules natively into their health app.
Even though everyone has to sleep, people associate sleep with laziness. And sleep-related brands are often stuffy or generic. Combatting this perception is key to Eight’s success.
We positioned sleep as a fitness activity, making the Eight brand more like Nike than Serta. Our content design had to reflect this positioning, too.
We recorded a series of body-weight and yoga exercise videos themed to parts of the sleep journey (light themed for morning wake up and dark for evening wind down).
