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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.\u00a0 It would be \u201cthe blanket that hugs you back,\u201d which is now our registered trademark.\u00a0 I asked my wife to make a child size prototype to show around to our neighbors with kids.\u00a0 No one liked it.\u00a0 It was too heavy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I gave her the prototype to try out.\u00a0 She came back the next day saying she needed more.\u00a0 From that moment on, I knew weighted blankets were going to be huge.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That\u2019s our legal name to this day. We sold our first blanket in 1998 to a friend we made in Boise, Idaho.<\/p>\n
Keith: Honestly, I was not surprised by their popularity.\u00a0 What did surprise me was that it took so long.\u00a0 Knowing that we had a market within the autism and sensory processing disorder communities, we started marketing our weighted blankets to OTs in 1998.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Slowly, over the next decade, weighted blankets remained a cottage industry, but there was growing awareness.\u00a0 By around 2014, the mass media started catching on.\u00a0 We were featured in Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Dr. Oz, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and others.\u00a0 It was around that time, I was able to quit my regular job and focus on the family business.\u00a0 Then, in 2017, we were interviewed by Time Magazine for their 2017 invention of the year award.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But alas, no.\u00a0 The award went to the Gravity Weighted Blanket which had broken the record on Kickstarter for raising the most money for a start up.\u00a0 By that time, we had been in business for almost 20 years.\u00a0 With the award, they acknowledged that Gravity did not invent the weighted blanket, but that they brought it to the mass market.\u00a0 From 2017 on, weighted blankets exploded, as did our business.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n