#2 Pillow Cube

This message is (unofficially) approved by viral TikTok chiropractor “King of Cracks,” who is a vocal fan of Pillow Cube to his 5+ million followers. Side sleepers know the pain of finding the perfect pillow — they’re too stiff, too soft, too high, too low. The side-sleeper search is over. 

   Based in Lindon, Pillow Cube’s Jay Davis, founder and CEO, and his team crafted a premium foam block with 90 degree angles to better align the spine during sleep. So long, neck and shoulder pain. 

   Pillow Cube is selling hundreds of thousands of pillows a year — that’s what successful (and comfy) disruption looks like.

   P.S. Did we mention the Biebers sleep on Pillow Cubes?

I got into viral marketing and eventually wanted to build a team and start my own agency. I started Creatably in 2017.

Creatably focused on creating better content for entrepreneurs to sell their products better. We started working with a lot of great, local clients. It was fun seeing these businesses grow and scale.

Over time, I started thinking, “We’ve got to do our own consumer brand.” We loved working with clients, but I thought it would be fun to see if we could own our own brand. We started brainstorming tons of ideas. 

Ever since I was little, I’d sleep on a couple pillows and my neck would hurt. Pillows were annoying. I never felt like I slept in alignment. 

During this brainstorming phase, I was looking at samples for pillows, and we were getting pitched by different mattress companies. Someone had sent us these 12x12x3 sections of cut foam. I put two together, laid down on them, and thought, “Oh man. That’s the pillow I’ve always wanted. Why doesn’t anybody make a pillow like this?” 

Everyone was trying to make a pillow that works when you’re on your back AND your side. No one was willing to make a pillow that pure side-sleepers would love.

As I started showing samples to friends and family, they’d say, “That’s really weird.” Then they would try it and say, “Actually, I’m not giving this back.” 

That’s when I knew, “OK, we’re on to something.”

It’s important to be willing to try new things and ask questions. I think there’s a reason most innovators are not attached to the “old way” of doing things. When people say, “That’s just now how we do it,” that’s usually a good sign for entrepreneurs.

We launched Pillow Cube on Kickstarter and didn’t do crazy at all — we did $40,000. Then we launched the wider version of the pillow (now known as the Side Cube), and that’s where sales really took off because it was more broadly applicable. 

We started delivering product in Dec. 2019, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that we really had a single Pillow Cube employee. It was just the Creatably teammates working on it in their spare time. That is the birth story of Pillow Cube. It wasn’t this super strategic move with us going after the bedding industry. We just created a product that people loved. As we sold more products, we would run into more people who said they couldn’t sleep without it.

As we started to talk to more customers, we expanded, and now we sell knee pillows, kid pillows, mattresses and more.

We had around 500 people supporting the original Kickstarter, and now we have around 1,000 new customers in a day.

People will reach out to me and say, “I haven’t slept well in 25 years, and I’ve tried every pillow on the market.” 

Then, they say this is the one product that solved their problems. That’s the best compliment. It’s awesome to see the power of products — they can truly improve our lives if they’re made the right way.