Gravity Blanket Got a Makeover to Calm Stressed Consumers

As holiday gift-giving season reaches its peak, tens of thousands of Americans will soon find themselves the recipients of a trendy little item called a Gravity Blanket. It is, as the name suggests, a blanket with weights stitched inside—roughly 20 pounds for the average adult. The Gravity Blanket is currently enjoying a cultural moment, showing up everywhere from Oprah’s best-of list to USA Today’s hot gift holiday roundup. But almost every successful product has an X factor, an unexpected force that helped put it over the top in combination with timing, design and marketing. So what is Gravity Blanket's special ingredient? Well, uh, probably President Donald Trump. When the president took office in late January 2016, the 48% of Americans who didn’t vote for him freaked out. Many of them had trouble sleeping. The American Psychological Association confirmed that the 2016 election was a “source of significant stress for more than half of Americans.” What could they do to help relax, calm down and get to bed? There was always medication, of course. But weeks after the election, an entrepreneur named John Fiorentino took to Twitter with a cure that required no prescription. “I made a 25-pound magic blanket,” he said. “Retweet if you’re stressed.” How Does It Work? Getty Images While there’s not much in the way of clinical study on the efficacy of weighted blankets, years of practical use suggest they work quite well. Ideally, the blanket should weigh about a tenth of the user’s body weight and, once applied, works via a process called “deep touch pressure stimulation,” which the company likens to “the feeling of being held or hugged.” That feeling purportedly ups the production of serotonin and melatonin, but overall, it also just feels nice. Logically enough, Gravity Blanket extended this principle to a host of other products that it’s pioneered, such as weighted robes and weighted sleep masks. Fiorentino had been hired by media company Futurism to launch its first consumer product. As Mike Grillo, Futurism’s then-COO and Gravity Blanket’s current CEO, recalls, “we were looking into products that would make sense for an audience that was tech-focused. We noticed a lot of stuff related to how the science of sleep affects performance and came across these weighted blankets used in occupational therapists’ offices. We ordered a bunch.” For many years, therapists working with a wide range of conditions from autism spectrum disorder to dementia had relied on weighted blankets to help patients calm down and sleep. Grillo and his business partners knew they could not lay claim to inventing these blankets, but they could repackage them for a general audience. That’s how the ordinary, institutional, weighted blanket metamorphosed into a quilted, velvety duvet cover in beautiful colors and became the Gravity Blanket. Its Kickstarter campaign turned heads when 23,805 people forked over $4.7 million in seed money, and the brand never looked back. In 2018, Time magazine observed that “although the year-old startup didn’t invent the [blankets] … it perfected the art of marketing them to the masses.” Worth Its Weight Courtesy of Gravity Blanket Futurism COO Mike Grillo (1) launched Gravity Blanket, then stepped aboard as the brand’s CEO. Once the blankets were perfected, the company turned toward retail design, such as these end caps for Target (2). While Gravity Blanket is essentially an online company, getting the word out about a product like this necessarily involved tactile experiences, such as this pop-up shop—called The Snooze Room (3)—that appeared at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center shopping complex. Today, Grillo doesn’t shy from the suggestion that his company’s aptitude lay not in invention, but presentation. “There’s nothing wrong with people making this as a commodity,” he said. “And there is price sensitivity to be addressed. We’re never going to be the $40 Amazon blanket.” At $195 for a basic 20-pound Gravity Blanket, that’s true. But it’s also true that millions of overworked, underslept Americans have made this well-timed product a hit. And even though the 2016 election is a distant memory now, the stress generated by the 2020 one seems to have supplied Gravity Blanket with plenty of new customers.

Perspective

Gravity Blanket's Makeover Makes for a Great Gift in This Mentally Draining Year

Once an occupational therapy tool, its weight has a calming effect

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara