She's Outgrown the Garage and Is Ready for the Next Step. He Has the Experience to Guide Her

Boxed co-founder Chieh Huang helps Bearaby founder Kathrin Hamm navigate the thorny issues that arise when managing a rapidly growing business.

- GRAHAM WINFREY

In 2019, just five months after launching her weighted blanket company, Bearaby, Kathrin Hamm received an email from a buyer at the home furnishings retailer West Elm. The buyer had read an article about Bearaby's blankets and wanted to visit the company's showroom to see the product in person. The only problem: Bearaby didn't have a showroom.

"We were two people with five sewing machines in a garage,” Hamm says. Rather than taking the meeting in the garage, Hamm, 39, packed 300 pounds' worth of Bearaby blankets onto a borrowed hotel trolley and rolled them into West Elm's headquarters in Brooklyn. The 20-pound, hand-knit blankets were a hit. All of a sudden, Bearaby had national distribution in West Elm.

"That was kind of the pivotal moment,” Hamm says. "At that stage, we didn't know how to do digital marketing, and we were just figuring out the product-market fit.” By the end of 2020, Bearaby had reached $21 million in annual sales. The following year, revenue nearly doubled.

Like many fast-moving products, Bearaby's blankets were born of a personal need. In 2017, while working as an economist at the World Bank, the German-born Hamm ordered a weighted blanket to help her sleep. The product worked-the full-body pressure of a weighted blanket raises your body's serotonin and melatonin levels-but it was filled with plastic beads that made her too hot. After noticing a gap in the market for a more breathable version, Hamm worked on a prototype using densely layered yarn made from organic cotton. She then quit her job at the World Bank and gave herself a year to company off the ground.