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 productmarket fit.” By the end
