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The Story of a Brand Show

Kulala - Finally, Parents & Baby Get a Good Night’s Sleep

The Story of a Brand Show

Ramon Vela

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.9147 Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode is brought to you by Sendlane.

 

"If the baby doesn't sleep, nobody sleeps." That's the challenge that faced Kulala, a brand that creates sleep solutions for the baby and the whole family.

 

Sofia Axelrod, Founder and Chief Science Officer of Solaria Systems (parent company of Kulala), had insomnia for much of her early life. Her struggles led her to study behavioral science, where she researched the fundamentals of sleep.

 

How Babies Sleep: The Gentle, Science-Based Method to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night

 

"I wrote a book about it, and the book has been a big success in many countries," Sofia says. "I thought, what else can I do? ... I started a company developing lighting and other technologies to help us sleep better."

 

The brand aimed at helping babies sleep is Kulala - a word meaning "sleep" in Swahili. Ultimately the company - Solaris Systems - will create other products to help adults sleep better.

 

"It's hard to quantify how much sleep you should be getting," Sofia says. "There's a lot of messaging around that that seems contradictory. The good news is that we have many answers from a scientific perspective. And that's why I started a company."

 

According to Sofia, about 60 percent of Americans report they don't sleep well some of the time and over a longer time, sleep deprivation can make you sick by increasing your risk for diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more.

 

Sleeping pills - a traditional and easy-to-obtain approach - will cause people to get tired and fall asleep, but she says they don't leave you well-rested.

 

"Ultimately, that's where I have specific thoughts and a specific method and priorities of what's important and what's not important," she says.

 

In Part 1, Sofia talks about:

 

* Gratitude to New York City for providing the right environment for her to thrive in her career,
* Her early struggles with insomnia influenced her career path.
* How sleep deprivation affects a person.
* Why sleeping pills aren't the cure.
* The differing schools of thought about baby sleep.
* The importance of recognizing your total daily sleep needs.

 

Join Ramon Vela and Sofia Axelrod as they break down the inside story on The Story of a Brand.

 

For more on Kulala Land, visit: https://kulalaland.com/ 

 

Subscribe and Listen to the podcast on all major apps. Simply search for “The Story of a Brand,” or click here to listen on your favorite podcast player: Listen now.

 

*

 

This episode is also brought to you by Sendlane.

 

If all DTC companies were forced to turn off Facebook ads, they'd be dead on arrival. Why is that?

 

They over-invest in paid acquisition and under-invest in retention.

 

Luckily, Sendlane makes it easy to solve this problem. Sendlane is an E-Commerce Customer Experience Platform helping hundreds of DTC brands to tighten their existing customer relationships.

 

Sendlane automates personalized customer experiences through Welcome and Abandoned Cart workflows, SMS, Deep Data Integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce, multi-store functionality, and much more.

 

Plus, they don't stand for lazy customer support. Their San-Diego-based team has an average 1-minute response time from a live human, making sure you never get stuck in a chat queue ever again.

 

Curious about how Sendlane can help your DTC brand grow? Schedule a demo with a Specialist. Visit https://www.sendlane.com/story 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

So I'm one of these people who really has had a hard time sleeping.

0:05.6

I'm an insomniac.

0:07.4

And my whole life I've kind of, you know,

0:10.8

struggled with getting up in the morning because I couldn't fall asleep.

0:15.8

College was a disaster.

0:18.0

And that's just been kind of who I am.

0:27.9

And nothing really worked until I joined this lab.

0:33.9

I'm a research scientist and I have a PhD in biology. And for my postdoctoral work, I wanted to study something about behavior. So I found this lab that studies sleep and circadian rhythms.

0:41.3

Circadian rhythms are things that happens in our body and behavior every day, like sleep.

0:48.3

And so I joined this lab and I started researching the fundamentals of sleep, why we sleep, how we sleep, when we

0:56.6

sleep. And just by being in the lab, I learned so much about how we can sleep better that I

1:04.8

basically got rid of all my sleep problems. And that was great. And suddenly I wasn't tired anymore

1:10.5

all the time and my life just got

1:13.3

better. But then I became pregnant and I thought, oh, now it's all going to start again. And

1:20.5

yeah, I came up with a method to make sure my baby would sleep well at night and it worked because it's based on science. This is the story of a brand, a podcast that helps people learn the story behind their favorite

1:44.7

consumer companies. I'm Ramon Vela, and I believe that people want to know more about the

1:49.8

brands and the products they purchase. So each week, I interview the founder of a consumer brand,

1:55.0

unpack their story, their products, and their mission so you can decide which products are

1:59.0

worth buying and which brands are worth supporting.

2:03.8

Did you know that according to a new study, more than a third of American adults are not getting

2:08.2

enough sleep on a regular basis? And over the long term, sleep deprivation can literally

2:13.8

make you sick by increasing your risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more.

...

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