Jul 26, 2019
How Gravity Blankets Establishes Weighty Partnerships with Likeminded Companies
Over the past year, you’ve seen Gravity launch several successful brand partnerships. For us, it’s not about creating a mass volume of partnerships, but rather developing those that further our brand while also providing value for our customers.
The success of these partnerships begins first and foremost with finding the right partners. To start, we always ensure that potential partners play in the health and wellness space but don’t make products that compete directly with ours. It’s all about finding a natural synergy between the two brands – that they’re complementary.
From there, we ensure that there’s a unique product offering. We want to bring something to life that neither brand has done to achieve the end goal of better sleep or de-stressing for our consumers.
Take our partnership with Calm, the No. 1 meditation and sleep app in the world. Mike, our CEO, and myself had worked with a few of the folks over there at previous jobs, and since being at Gravity, we were inspired by what they were doing for the health and wellness category. It made perfect sense to reach out and see how we could partner.
Going into our initial call, we knew there was a natural alignment between our two companies, and by talking candidly about each other’s priorities for the year, it was clear that we could both benefit from working together. We wanted to continue to establish ourselves in the wellness space, and Calm provides access to a very engaged wellness consumer. Calm wanted to invest in more physical product, and we are able to provide the expertise in product development.
So with the synergy in brand category and goals, we sought to provide an experience for both sets of consumers that they couldn’t find out there, and the Gravity x Calm: Dream Package was born. It’s a custom Calm-branded blanket (Calm’s signature blue color and with a Calm logo stitch) that comes with a free subscription to Calm. When someone is using the Calm app – whether they're meditating or they're getting ready for bed – our product really adds to the experience. Together, we found a way to collectively play in the sleep and wellness space without directly competing.
Or take how we worked with a NYC-based recovery studio called ReCOVER, which specializes in recovery treatments and relaxation therapies. One treatment called NuCalm is designed to improve sleep patterns and combat stress. While very similar to what our products do, it’s a very different approach - involving music and various stimulations to the body via patches on the neck and head. We worked with them so our blanket is part of that treatment paradigm; customers have the option to use the blanket during the session to enhance the experience.
While not a custom product, this partnership provided a one of a kind experience to consumers and introduced our product to a new set of them. Given the success with ReCOVER, we’re partnering with another recovery studio in Pittsburgh, called the Pittsburgh Performance Institute for a similar treatment.
Most recently, we launched a partnership with Eight Sleep, the sleep fitness // mattress company, for the Fourth of July. During this partnership, if you purchased one of their new Pod mattresses, you received a free Cooling Blanket from us. This was a way to improve Eight Sleep's offering while also getting our product in the hands of consumers who were already looking for better sleep.
We're always in search of new partners. Our goal is finding something that works for everyone involved. In early conversations, it's all about aligning on a mutual set of goals. Once that common ground is established, each party will brainstorm separately and come together to share concepts and flesh them out further. That's when the ball really starts rolling. And if there's a fit and an idea that makes sense for our consumers, we dive in to bring it to life.
Then we can sleep well at night knowing it's a win-win-win: for our consumers, for our partners, and for us.
