A Note From Our Founder: Pause Before You Purchase
We’re prompting our customers to pause before purchasing, and here’s why.
Bearassentials
At Bearaby, our products are mindfully made, but we’ve realized the typical e-commerce experience simply isn’t.
We’d like you to ‘sleep on it’ before you buy our Black Napper – because mindful shopping is the new black.
Here is a note from our founder, Dr. Kathrin Hamm, to add some color around our Black Friday campaign.
Did you know?
Ever since the start of the modern Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been known as the unofficial start to a bustling holiday shopping season.
Right from the start, we knew that Bearaby would be much more than just weighted blankets. We meticulously researched the psychological effects of weight, and the impact of our materials, so that the Napper fit into our 360-degree approach to conscious products: mindful and healthy.
We’ve been overwhelmed by the support and need over the past months. There’s no doubt that the mental toll the pandemic has taken is much more than anything we’ve seen in recent memory as a collective, global community. We see stories coming in daily about how rest, relaxation, and comfort have been things that made a small dent in trying to help us cope with what’s going on.
Generally speaking, we are more likely to make irrational decisions when feeling stressed, anxious and rushed. We overeat, snack before going to bed, binge-watch TV and over-buy, especially when products are on discount.
The e-commerce experience of click-and-buy – further exacerbated by the Amazons of the world – has become extraordinarily quick and potentially mindless. And we realized while our products were mindful, the typical e-commerce purchasing experience just isn’t.
We want to help our audience arrive at a mindful decision without regret. That's why, for Black Friday, we decided to build in meditative pauses to encourage consumers to sleep on their decision - before they're able to reach the purchase page for our Black Friday weighted blanket.
As a researcher and a Ph.D., I’m also fascinated by the academic momentum built around the world of behavioral research. So, I connected with Dr. Ting Jiang from the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University to help us to incorporate mindfulness into our e-commerce experience. We want mindful purchasing to become a core part of our regular flow and allow consumers access to the meditative functionality even after Black Friday is over.
Engaging Duke University’s researchers to help us understand this phenomenon before, during, and after we launch our Black Friday campaign, we can further share these learnings with the broader e-commerce community so that they can, in turn, make their purchasing experiences even more mindful.
Now, more than ever, we need to look at the entire experience of a product, brand, and consumer – from ad, to purchase, to use, and beyond.
We think being mindful is a message that resonates not only with our own audience but also highlights a larger conversation on how DTC brands can play a part in shaping a new wave of conscious consumerism, starting with the consumer’s well-being even before they purchase your product. We know this movement has the potential to catch on – we don’t want to own it, we want it to spread.
Mindfully yours,
Dr. Kathrin Hamm
Many of you have asked what Bearaby is doing for Black Friday 2021... and the answer is the same as every other day of the year. Experience mindful shopping here.
