How a Google Search Turned Into a $48-Million Blanket Empire

Sleep Country’s jingle – “Why buy a mattress anywhere else?” – was some of the first English my parents learned after coming to Canada from Israel. My brothers and I would hum it around our house, a sign to our parents we were assimilating to our new country.
My Canadian dream was to make enough money to support my parents, immigrants who worked blue-collar jobs and always worried about supporting my four brothers and me. After watching a movie about someone losing weight from a juice cleanse, my mom was inspired to start her own cleanse and after 70 days of drinking only juice, she lost 70 pounds. Her hair and skin began to glow and countless women would stop her on the street and ask her for her beauty secrets. Within weeks, we turned our house into a juice factory and started juicing for the neighbourhood.
Near the end of my senior year of high school, the juice business became my life. Each morning, I got up at three o’clock and parked the family car at a Tim Hortons a few blocks away from the Canadian Food Terminal, where all grocery stores in Toronto come to buy produce for the day. I’d jump the fence and jaunt up behind 18-wheeler trucks from NoFrills, Longo’s, and Terry’s Whole Foods. “Where’s your truck?” the man selling produce once said. Upon realizing I was just a 19-year-old kid trying to buy cheap fruit for my business, he offered to drop food off at my house on his way home from work every morning at 6 am.
It started small–we’d juice for just a few people each night. Soon enough, our local customers saw the results and told their friends. Before long, we had 60 people each night at the house, picking up mason jars of juice. While most of my friends had a front mat and bench in their foyer, we had a cash register. We soon offered to deliver and at eight o’clock each night after school and hockey, I’d load up the car and distribute juice to the neighbourhood.
My family named our business Revitasize and we opened up our first of many locations in Thornhill. I enrolled in York University’s business program and enjoyed it, but mostly because I was applying the skills I learned in my own business. I quickly realized that whether it was juice or something else, running businesses would be my career. Soon enough, I dropped out of school.
In a bar one night, an old acquaintance approached me and told me he wanted to introduce me to a friend of his, a fellow business owner. Upon meeting Lior Ohayon, I was so inspired. His business, a software company called ScopeLeads that scraped Google search results and compiled them into useful documents for companies, was making way more money than mine despite having just one employee compared to my 100. I asked to meet him again the next day and within an hour of our second meeting, he put my entire business online. Three months later, my online store was selling better than all five of my brick-and-mortar locations combined.
I knew I needed to start a business with Lior. He learned that the term “weighted blanket” had been searched on Google by Americans 300,000 times per month the previous year, but that no weighted blanket companies were doing particularly well. I bought virtually every weighted blanket on the internet and cut them open. I found they were generally too big, impossible to wash, noisy when you moved them, and not aesthetically pleasing.
I developed a prototype based on my findings and Lior and I met at his condo every day from 5 pm until midnight to work on our company. We made a deal: if our business sales did not surpass those of our individual businesses in six months, we’d give up and return to our other ventures full-time. We launched in January 2018—on our second day, we made our first sale, and four more by our fourth day. For six months, we just kept growing.
By July, however, our sales were slowing down. We’d done business with around 3,000 customers until then, many of whom had bought multiple blankets. We decided to call them all and ask for their feedback. “We love the blanket,” most of them said. “But it’s 30 degrees outside now. The last thing I want at night is a weighted blanket. I’m boiling.”
Understanding that we had a seasonal business initially made us panic. If we could only bring in business for half the year, was this venture worth it? That’s when we learned what we call the “power of one more”: how important it can be to take just one more step when you feel like giving up. We realized there was a huge market of people looking to be cooled off while they slept, yet no company offered this relief—and just like that, our lives changed forever.
Lior and I traveled the world looking for the fabric we needed to make our cooling blankets. Eventually, in Israel, we found a company that could develop a new material for us – iced fabric – that uses cooling fibers engineered to remove heat and moisture from a blanket, to keep you fresh and cold. We started a Kickstarter to raise the $70,000 we needed to create 100,000 yards of it. In just 30 days, we gained 12,000 backers across 16 countries and raised $1.5 million–but we didn’t stop there. What if we took this fabric and made sheets out of it? What about pillows? How about a mattress? With this new cooling technology, we multiplied our sales by 20 and brought in $10 million in our second year of business.
Related: What Competitive Hockey Taught Me About Building a Business
After our fourth year, we sold our business to Sleep Country for $48 million. Although the story of Hush Blankets may seem like an instant success, countless times it seemed like the world was melting around us. Under different circumstances, Lior or I could have easily given up. But we had an unbreakable trust in one another, shared values, and true belief in our product. We both believed in the end of our story before it made sense to believe in it.
Revitasize still stands in nine locations around the GTA, many of which are now run by my parents and brothers. Today, I run Founders Club, a community for entrepreneurs to connect and help each other’s businesses grow. Now, I sleep better than ever – not just because of my Hush mattress, but because I know my family is financially secure. I can’t help humming a jingle now that I feel more connected to than ever: after all, why would you buy a mattress anywhere else?
—As told to Samantha Fink