Keith: In 1997, our family had just moved back home from Boise, Idaho where I was working for an ad agency. One day, my daughter placed a Beanie Baby on my shoulder and I noticed how it hugged me. My first thought was to imagine a blanket filled with these little beans. It would be “the blanket that hugs you back,” which is now our registered trademark. I asked my wife to make a child size prototype to show around to our neighbors with kids. No one liked it. It was too heavy. I remembered a friend of ours who is a special needs teacher telling me that she used to hug the kids with autism and sensory processing disorder in her class to calm them down. I gave her the prototype to try out. She came back the next day saying she needed more. From that moment on, I knew weighted blankets were going to be huge. I found a manufacturer here in Los Angeles and started making them. We called our new business The Original Beanie Blanket Company but Ty Corporation, the maker of the Beanie Babies, sent us a Cease and Desist letter, so we called it the Original Bean Blanket Company. That’s our legal name to this day. We sold our first blanket in 1998 to a friend we made in Boise, Idaho.
Bevoya: In the past decade or so weighted blankets have become incredibly popular. As someone who has watched the marketing cycle unfold, what has surprised you about the popularity of weighted blankets?
Keith: Honestly, I was not surprised by their popularity. What did surprise me was that it took so long. Knowing that we had a market within the autism and sensory processing disorder communities, we started marketing our weighted blankets to OTs in 1998. Around that time, I had applied for a patent on my own for the design of a weighted blanket, but it was denied. By the early 2000s, as OTs started to get the word out about weighted blankets, there were a couple of moms with special needs kids who also started making and selling them. Slowly, over the next decade, weighted blankets remained a cottage industry, but there was growing awareness. By around 2014, the mass media started catching on. We were featured in Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Dr. Oz, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and others. It was around that time, I was able to quit my regular job and focus on the family business. Then, in 2017, we were interviewed by Time Magazine for their 2017 invention of the year award. After hearing about our journey from inventing a new product and becoming a leader in a niche community, we were sure we would be featured. But alas, no. The award went to the Gravity Weighted Blanket which had broken the record on Kickstarter for raising the most money for a start up. By that time, we had been in business for almost 20 years. With the award, they acknowledged that Gravity did not invent the weighted blanket, but that they brought it to the mass market. From 2017 on, weighted blankets exploded, as did our business. But with that media attention came an outpouring of competition, now obtaining their weighted blankets from China, like Gravity did, and the prices for weighted blankets dropped to a level that has made it very hard for a US manufacturer like us to compete. So now, instead of just trying to sell The Magic Weighted Blanket, I am trying to sell the one person who has been there all along, The Weighted Blanket Guy.
