Eight Sleep | Pod
Biometric sensors that measure sleep quality. AI-driven analytics determine optimal sleeping conditions. Personalized sleep environment delivered through the bed. Award-winning design. The world’s most advanced sleep system.
Led a team of talented designers and engineers to deliver the world's most advanced sleep system. Offering dual zone heating and cooling, the Pod Pro creates the perfect personalized environment to optimize your sleep. Following it's successful launch in 2019, I led the follow-up launches of the Pod Pro and Cover products. Named 2019 Times Best Inventions
In collaboration with Bould Design, the Pod design evolved to strike a balance between the functional needs of a performance appliance and a form that is both distinctive and would pair well with many bedroom designs. Importantly, it needed to not be seem dated over the 5-10 years of expected useful life, an unusual challenge for consumer electronics. Winner of the Red Dot 2020 design award
The killer feature of the Pod is dual zone climate control, allowing customers to set up heating or cooling on each side of the bed. This fixed the fight over the thermostat, and allowed both partners to sleep in total comfort.
Proof of concept that I built by hand. I did the original layout of the thermal circuit and built this to demonstrate we could achieve the performance we needed within the form factor that we wanted.
When we started in December 2017, all prototype hacking and testing work was done by myself and Eight's CTO. Hired most of our hardware team as we went, so I had a hands-on role throughout the project.
The hub in its various states before launch. The most complex products should be modularized, and iterated upon. In total, Pod went through eight distinct product build phases before hitting our launch in April 2019. Hundreds of pre-production models built.
One team, one dream. Prototyping by hand takes time and effort. Our hardware team had a tight-knit culture, always ready to help each other in a pinch.
Our team traveled to China to collaborate with our manufacturing partners. We made a total of 7 trips to China during the development of this product.
Everything in soft goods development comes down to developing physical samples. A teammate and I visited one of China's largest fabrics markets to see/touch samples in order to find our suppliers directly.
Prototype sample builds of this size and complexity sometimes took 10-12 straight hours of work to complete. Here, a team of two worked until 3AM to finish modify a sample for us to approve ahead of our flight the next day!
Post launch, I led a 3-week project to design and launch a soft goods product that would allow the Pod to retrofit onto other mattresses. This design allowed our manufacturing partner to increase their output by 50% while cutting costs.