Epworth Sleepiness Scale

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale is a standard scale you will find at sleep clinics everywhere. It is used to determine just how sleepy you are. If you score over 10, then you should talk to your doctor.

Use this scale...
0 = would never doze or sleep.
1 = slight chance of dozing or sleeping
2 = moderate chance of dozing or sleeping
3 = high chance of dozing or sleeping

Here are the situations...
___ Sitting and reading
___ Watching TV
___ Sitting inactive in a public place
___ Being a passenger in a motor vehicle for an hour or more
___ Lying down in the afternoon
___ Sitting and talking to someone
___ Sitting quietly after lunch (no alcohol)
___ Stopped for a few minutes in traffic while driving

Add up the numbers for your total score. Remember, if you scored higher than 10, then you should see your doctor about your excessive daytime sleepiness.

SleepPhones' Different Versions

I think I'll start calling SleepPhones by version types now. We have had a number of upgrades over time. This will help everyone keep better track of stuff. Currently, we are selling what's left of Version 1.0 on Amazon. We are selling Version 2.0 on eBay. And Version 3.0 is on SleepPhones.com.

This is our prototype, hence Version 0.3. It had a nice fuzzy fleece, but it was too hard to work with. Plus, it didn't come in our core colors: lavender and gray. The wire was also too thick. I think we bought the wire from RadioShack.


This is our Version 1.0 SleepPhones. I made all of them in 2007. Then I had some employees make some in 2008. We bought the fabric for this version from JoAnn Fabrics. We would buy out the entire stock of lavender from the store or from online sometimes when it went on sale. In the picture, I am wearing a special edition red one for February. The wire is in the front coming out of an eyelet. Version 1.0 had a cute sheep eyelet. But then the eyelet company stopped making the sheep and refused to make us custom eyelets. We had bought bought out all of their sheep eyelets apparently. So Version 1.1 had just a plain eyelet. The left speaker is fixed in place, and the right speaker is adjustable by pulling on little strings affixed outside with a bead.

Version 2.0 was primarily made by our employees, though I did make quite a few. It's actually a better product with an interesting design that made it possible to remove the speakers in order to wash the headband. Plus it uses recycled Polartec® fleece and improved speakers. The only problem with it is that it was complicated to remove and replace the speakers. This version didn't last too long because we soon came up with the next version.

For some reason, people didn't like the wire coming out the front. It was always so confusing for people, even though we had many pictures everywhere of the wire coming out the front. And it was in the written instructions. We figured that the wire being in the front was better ergonomically for sleeping. But we had so many confused customers that we decided we'd make the wire in the back for Version 3.0. We also added Velcro. The speakers remain removable for washing.

NBC 4 Health and Fitness Expo

Jan. 16-17, SleepPhones had a booth at the Washington DC Convention Center for the very big NBC 4 Health and Fitness Expo where people could get free health screening, check out new products, and get lots of information about health from major organizations. The National Sleep Foundation had a section there called the Big Sleep Show. SleepPhones were a part of the Big Sleep Show and were one of the biggest hits in the section. Our booth was constantly busy with people trying on SleepPhones and asking about them. We ran out of brochures by and sold out the first day and had to scramble to get more available for the second day. Shout out to Office Depot in Rockville, MD for staying open late for last-minute copies!
Thanks to our employees for their long days of hard work!

Jacklyn Bruce, JD University of Richmond School of Law, sales extraordinaire
Christopher Gordon, up-and-coming business entrepreneur from Towson University
Patrick Reinheimer, up-and-coming economist from UMBC

Sheep Version 2

The first sheep was so perfect we only had one change to make. The back pocket had to be bigger. The sheep now pictured is version two, but it has the same problem - it still doesn't fit an iPhone. So it's going back again for one more revision. It must be able to fit an iPhone.

Stolen SleepPhones Shipment

The shipment of SleepPhones that were to go out on Tuesday, January 19, are missing. We are not sure where they could be at this time. Sometime between 8:30am and 1:30pm, someone took them, and it was not the post office. This incident was reported to the police on Friday, Jan. 22, and we are working with the police to investigate this matter.

Tuesday, January 19, was the Tuesday after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We had orders from Friday Jan. 15 to Tuesday Jan. 19 in that shipment. It was a very large shipment, so we are quite upset about it. We are also upset that customers who ordered on Jan. 15th would have to wait until until Jan 27- Jan 30 to receive their package now. The international orders that normally take 2-3 weeks will have to wait even longer now. It's definitely an anomaly in our customer service, and we hope our reputation of 4.8 stars out of 5.0 stars on Google does not suffer.

It's been a bit of a nightmare in other ways. We will refund the rush shipping charge for all involved customers. All customers were notified by email of the incident. We have to ask for refunds for all of the postage we used to send out the original ones. I have unarchived all of the orders involved, but I cannot "re-ship" them with a different tracking number. So customers will have to receive a new tracking number email. We have received a few complaints so far, and I am anticipating more. Some customer spam filters are set in such a way that our emails do not reach them, so I'm sure I'll get some phone calls about this. We talked with the police last night, the postmaster this morning, some neighbors, and the county dump. We had to meet with our employees to pick up some finished SleepPhones from them on short notice. Our weekend will be spent trying to catch back up on all of the orders. Since the merchandise is likely lost forever, we will have to talk to our CPA about writing off this loss. And we'll have to talk to the police throughout this week to see what happened.

Record Low Sales in a Day

Today's sales is tied for Christmas Day = very few. It's the slowest day of the year so far. Yesterday and the day before were great days. It's so strange how that all works.

Last night we decided to take the Full Night MP3 Players off because they are just too much trouble to make. We charge them up and load them with the 8 hours of ocean waves and 15 minutes of bird chirping. Then we test them. It is difficult to keep up with that task so we have decided to stop selling them temporarily.

In the process of removing the Full Night MP3 Player, I forgot to take off a picture. So the page was slightly misaligned. I wonder if that's why sales are down today. Perhaps potential customers were scared off by a mildly nonsensical webpage.

Google Checkout's Store Gadget

Recently, Google launched the ability for easy commerce via Checkout.

Polartec and Repreve Join Up

We use Polartec® fleece to make SleepPhones. We're very excited to hear that Polartec® is joining up with Repreve® to produce 100% recycled fleece in the future! Our current fleece is already 88% recycled plastic bottles, and 12% spandex. That probably won't change, because we need the spandex for the stretch. Every pound of Repreve 100 yarn converts 27 water bottles and saves a half gallon of gas. Their products should reach you in 2011.

Sheep Goes Back to Mary

Our baby sheep has to go back to Mary for a check up. Mary will take good care of him and make sure that he's getting his measurements taken. That way, one day, we'll get 2400 of his brothers, sisters, and counsins back! In the meantime, he's looks so despondent!

Dark Lavender SleepPhones Now Available!

We are now offering a beautiful dark lavender SleepPhones color - for a limited time! We bought a color not normally produced, so it will never be carried again. It will only be available for a few months most likely. All three sizes are offered. Get yours today!

Big Sleep Show Jan 16-17 at the Washington DC Convention Center

SleepPhones will have a booth at the Big Sleep Show next weekend! The Big sleep Show is part of the NBC 4 Health Expo. The National Sleep Foundation invited us to be part of the Expo, and we're very excited about attending.

We've done smaller local booths in the past, and we walked around the Big Sleep Show in Chicago last year.  This will be our first booth at a national expo.

We've hired 3 people to work for us. Chris and Patrick grew up together in Germantown, MD and are both going to school in the area. Chris is majoring in marketing, and Patrick is majoring in economics. They both worked door-to-door selling windows in the past. Jackie has a Juris Doctorate but prefers marketing. During the week, she does marketing for a big law firm. She loves talking to people so she finds opportunities to work with new products at expos on weekends. They are all fantastic people, and we're happy to have them helping us out.

We did our usual trick on Craig's List to find people. :-) It works! But we did screen out the people who couldn't spell or write a complete sentence. The people who did not provide a good reason for us to contact them or provide enough contact information were screened out. Some people had modeling experience and sent us great pictures - but scantily clad. Others sent non-professional fuzzy pictures, like from a webcam. It's important to show professionalism when looking for a job, even one that's just for a day. There are many other qualified good candidates who responded, but we found the few we needed within a day.

This picture is from our previous booth at the Entrepreneurial Women's Expo in October.

New Special Offers Page

All new offers will be listed here on the Special Offers page. It will include coupons, discounts, and promotions. Here are January 2010's offers.

• $1 off Instant Discount 3-Question Survey
  
• Orders over $100 will automatically receive a tin of lavender-scented hand cream or a 3 ounce bar of handmade soap, whichever is available.
  
  
• Orders over $200 will also receive 2 ounces of Teavana's Tranquil Dream® herbal tea.
  
  
• Orders over $300 will also receive an insulated SleepPhones shopping bag.
  
  

New Photos!

We hired William Ames to hire some models and take some pictures. Everyone came to our house to take pictures in the spare room Thursday. The pictures turned out great! We'll be using them for the website soon. And when we go to our Expo next weekend, we'll have a big banner up using one of the pictures. Now we just have to decide which of the 330 pictures to use. Talk about information overload in the digital age!

Mr. Ames was wonderful to work with. Many photographers are used to doing weddings, landscape, and portrait shots. The non-professional photographer just wants decent pictures of people and their activity at the time, so a person standing in front of the Eiffel Tower is a good enough picture. In product photography, there are a whole different set of rules. For example, instead of focusing on the eyes and the face, the photographer may focus on the product itself. Paying attention to stray hair, decreased distractions, and model expressions are much more important. Also, choosing clothes on the models that differ enough from the background helps in photoshopping the picture later. The color of the clothes can be easily changed. The background can be cut out and replaced. He taught me these tricks and worked with me to implement the poses I needed for the application I needed. Photographing for print is different from web design, for example. I didn't realized how important it was to be so specific about my needs until talking with Mr. Ames. I highly recommend William Ames Photography.

Comment Moderation

As this blog gets older and continues to generate new content, it ranks higher and higher on search engines. Ranking highly on search engines is generally good. But now we have to deal with comment spammers trying to piggy back on the high rankings. After finding a few spam comments (porn and internet marketing spam), I decided to begin moderating the comments. Sorry to all of the legit readers!

Year-End Accounting

Whew! I think I'm up to date on finances! Our accountant has been hounding us for year-end info to do tax estimates since November. But the holiday sales and personal obligations for the holidays have made that impossible. Having these past two weeks off from my day-job has been so nice and allowed me to catch up on many things.

I did inventory the night of December 31st. Lots of counting. And then on January 1st, I updated all accounts in QuickBooks. Now I need to send this information off to our accountant who will tell me how much to enter for amortization, depreciation, inventory adjustments, and stuff like that. After that, we'll have our profit numbers for this year. Currently the profit does not reflect some of those accounting adjustments. The amount of money we took out in owner distributions does not reflect profit in the accounting sense. If our profit was just the amount of money we took out, then we'd quit this never-ending exhausting entrepreneurial job. The accounting profit numbers would make us feel much better. Our growth and gross sales look great on paper. And our cash flow is very respectable. But for 3 years of hard work in addition to having demanding day-jobs, we'd certainly like to see more cash in our own pockets.

I think this coming year will finally make running this company financially worthwhile. Then we can cut back on our day-jobs and devote more time to building the company. We are quite conservative when it comes to money. We funded the company in the beginning with our own money. We don't have any outside investors, and we don't have any loans with the bank. We pay our credit card bills off every month. The company is our investment for our future, not a risk for our future. But because we have had to build it slowly with limited funds, it's been a long process.

This past holiday season sales haven't been too shabby. I think the economy is coming back. People are spending more in the discretionary category.

Mexico!

You'd think that having been on all of the continents of the world including Antarctica, we would have already sent SleepPhones to all of the countries in North America. But alas, we are now finally sending our first shipment to Mexico! Yay!

Wearing SleepPhones

I think I know what's in there! A nice picture of SleepPhones in action. 

USPS shipping

We have now moved to using Stamps.com. While we still have some gripes, we do prefer it much more to FedEx or driving to the post office.

• Price: With Stamps.com, there is a monthly fee ($15.99) in addition to the slightly discounted postal fees. The discounts are on the Express shipping. Delivery confirmation (domestic only) is free, which is very nice. There are no hidden fees like for rural addresses, and no pick up fees. The same postal lady that delivers our mail pick up our outgoing mail. 
• Software: The Stamps.com software is only available on Windows at this time. So we end up using my seven-year-old Dell and Jason's linux box with Windows for processing the orders. The software is somewhat finicky. For a while, it wouldn't let us ship international first class. On one computer, the printouts would be consistently on one side of the paper, but on the other computer, it alternates. Postage printed from one machine may not be viewed by the other machine, depending on the software version. If it can be viewed, it may not be complete. I'd use my MacBook with Parallels, but my Windows version on there has a virus, and it starts to slow down and acts strange after 10 minutes. I'm not savvy enough to reinstall it. Plus, it's now Jason's job to do the shipping every day, so I don't need to bother as much with it.
  
• Time for processing: I can copy and paste the entire address into the box. Stamps.com will parse it and figure out the apartment or suite number, city, state, zip, etc. It glitches a bit on the international orders but it does come close, so it's not too bad. All of the information is entered into the same page. Printing it will bring up a pop-up that confirms the corrected address (adds the 4 digit zip code and standardizes the address format) then allow you to send it to the printer. The only drawback with Stamps.com in this is that if you make a mistake, you'd have to ask for a refund of the printed postage. There is no way to easily cancel a printed shipment. With FedEx, you can print all you like, but you'll only be charged if they have to deliver it. For international orders, the customs form for USPS is much easier than the FedEx form. FedEx requires the International Harmonized Code for products. And each country has different Code requirements (different number of digits), so you can't even save SleepPhones with a standard code. You have to search for the right code each time.
  
• Time for shipping: Domestic order take 3-5 days for first class shipping. In our experience, it only takes about 2-4 days for most places. People in San Francisco can receive their SleepPhones in about 3 days sometimes. Since the post office delivers 6 days a week, people almost always receive their order within one week. People in Pennsylvania normally receive their packages in 1-3 days. If people upgrade to Priority shipping, it only takes 2-3 days for all locations, including Hawaii and Alaska, which is amazing for the price. Oh, FedEx considers Hawaii and Alaska overseas, because they are definitely not ground, so charges much much more.
• Bookkeeping: We don't need to keep track of how much each order costs for shipping, so being able to buy $200 worth of postage at a time is much easier for bookkeeping. We just see a credit card charge of $200 every now and then. 
• Service: Our mail lady is nice. Pick up is between 11:30am and 3pm, depending on the day and the weather. We just put the bag of SleepPhones next to our mailbox every day, double or triple wrapped if raining. Pick up is very consistent and dependable. The tracking is less than desirable though. Sometimes there is no tracking information until it arrives at its destination. There is no information about the package for about 2 days usually. International packages are not tracked at all. I'd like it if it would at least be scanned in on arrival at the post office, so we know and the customer knows that the package if out of our hands and in the system to be delivered. But that's usually not the case. It's not consistent either, so we just have to cross out fingers. However, in their defense, there have been very few mistakes. In the past 20 months or so and few thousand packages mailed, we've just received our third non-delivery complaint. USPS says the package was delivered, but the customer has not received it. (I'll take the customer's word usually.) I don't know how that could be, but I don't know the process that USPS uses to confirm delivery. Is it scanned when the postal delivery worker puts it in the mailbox? Is it scanned as the mail is being loaded on to the delivery truck? I don't know. It happened a few times when we were using FedEx too, so the problem is not isolated.
  
• Mailbox delivery: I think that this is less likely to be lost. It's not sitting at your front door, possibly blown away by the wind. I remember living in apartment buildings that received packages for you during the day. Then you'd have to pick up the package from the office. Of course, the office closes at 6pm, so you'd have to wait until Saturday to finally get it. And then they give you an attitude when you go to pick it up. And it's not like you can send a neighbor who didn't work during the days down there to pick it up either.
• Environmental considerations: The cute little postal truck has to drive around to your house daily anyway, so it's not making any extra trips. It does everything at the mailbox, so the engine is not left idling for longer than necessary. Compare that to a guy in a big truck having to walk up your driveways to your front door and print off a sticky note because you aren't home to sign for it. 

I think that just about covers all of the benefits of using Stamps.com for us.

FedEx Shipping

We knew the closing times of all local post offices (and they knew us as the annoying people who came in when they wanted to leave) for the surrounding 5 towns, and the most efficient way to drive to get there. But being in Southeastern Connecticut (NYC suburb) and driving around rush hour still meant that there was much aggravation. After pulling our hair out with rushing to the post office every other day for a few months, we were happy to switch to FedEx. We used FedEx for many months until discovering Stamps.com. The next post will be about Stamps.com. This one is about FedEx.

• Time for processing: It involved signing into our FedEx account. For each order, I filled out the Contact Name, Address (part 1), Address (part 2), City, State, Zip, phone number, and email address. Each step would involve a separate copy and paste. Then I had to enter the weight of shipment, dimensions - length, width, and height, select the date mailed, select home delivery, select pick up type, select ground shipping, select waiving the signature confirmation, etc. Then the next page would confirm the address. Once I check everything, I would finally get the label for printing. Each page reload, checkbox, and copy paste field took time and introduced possible glitches and mistakes. It took about 10 minutes to pack and ship each order.
  
• Time for shipping: Because most people selected ground shipping, it took 5 days to reach the West Coast. Some people didn't like having to wait a week to receive their package. FedEx Home Delivery didn't deliver on Monday, but it did deliver on Saturdays.
  
• Price: Shipments to the East coast cost less than the West coast shipments, so we had to take an average. Each shipment cost between $4-7. If we didn't ship enough packages, FedEx has an extra charge. Home delivery costs extra - FedEx prefers to deliver to businesses. Their address checker software determines whether an address is residential or not. Rural address like many places in the Midwest would cost an extra $4. When we were using FedEx (late 2007), gas prices were extremely high, so they had a gas surcharge, which varied from place to place. We negotiated with out nice FedEx sales representative for lower ground rates, but they don't give much discount on that. They do give better discounts on Express shipping. Our packages were usually less than a pound, but we had to pay for the minimum one pound charge. Big packages would be worth the trouble because FedEx rates for items weighing a few pounds or more is cheaper than the USPS.
• Bookkeeping: Each package was FedEx.com followed by the shipment number, and it would show up on our credit card in about 2-3 weeks. When I import the charges into QuickBooks, each charge would require me to either shorten the name to FedEx.com or create a new vendor account. It was a pain. 
• Service: The FedEx guy was nice. He came by at 11am every day for the pick up. It's been two years, and it's still the same guy who delivers our ground packages. Ground didn't pick up on Saturdays though. Once it left us, the delivery time was always very prompt as promised and easily trackable. And if the customer changed locations, the package would be redirected before arrival. Unfortunately, if they were not there to sign for it, the delivery may be held up by a few days until they were able to receive it. 
• Environmental Considerations: FedEx requires a large truck with low gas mileage driving around and parking (leaving the engine running) for about 30 seconds to a minute at each location. If it didn't have to drive there in the first place or leave the truck to walk to your porch, then it would be more efficient.

We were pretty happy with being able to ship without having to drive somewhere and waiting in line. But FedEx did have some drawbacks.