Best New Sleep Aid, the Sheep of Your Dreams System, is Now Available

Do you have trouble sleeping at night? Do you find yourself tossing, turning, and wishing you could just drift off peacefully? Are you kept awake by distracting noises, such as your partner’s snoring or your roommate’s loud music?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, we want to encourage you to check out our Sheep of Your Dreams system, one of the best new sleep aids for anyone looking for a drug-free, all-natural solution to sleeping problems.

New Sleep Aid Kit

The Sheep of Your Dreams sleep aid system includes a pair of SleepPhones™, a soft and cuddly SleepPhones Sheep, the Dreams CD, and a lavender sachet. All of these components work together to promote relaxation, relieve stress, and lead you into a sound and restful sleep. Plus, there is no risk of harmful side effects.

We suggest plugging your SleepPhones™ into your iPod or MP3 player, stowing the music player into Sheep’s back pocket, and listening to the soothing tracks found on the Dreams CD. Don’t forget that your SleepPhones™ can also double as a sleeping mask in order to block out light and keep you sleeping soundly until your alarm goes off. Finally, keep the fragrant lavender sachet close by as you drift off to sleep. Lavender can help with sleep problems such as insomnia, anxiety, and nightmares.

Best Sleep Aid System

The Sheep of Your Dreams sleeping aid system can help you fall asleep faster, so you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the day ahead. For those who suffer from sleeping problems and want to avoid turning to pharmaceuticals, this is one of the best sleep aids available. With the holiday season just around the corner, it makes a great gift as well!

Have you purchased the Sheep of Your Dreams sleeping aid system already? We would love to hear how this new sleep aid is making a difference in your life. Tell us about your experience below!

Packaging Lessons Part 3

Now that we have the final package design for this holiday season, we have to box it up. We have been reusing the various boxes we have around from the things that we buy. So our wholesale customers get their SleepPhones in Amazon boxes, Staples boxes, and a variety of other boxes. We'd try to rip off the excess stickers and cover up writing with SleepPhones stickers. It wasn't very professional looking, but at least we were reusing – one step up the sustainability chain from recycling. Our manufacturer's representative advised us to get some more consistent packaging.

Retailers like inner cartons and master cartons. Inner cartons are usually in 6-packs of 12-packs, depending on the size of the item and how they night fit on a shelf. They want to be able to take out a 6-pack, put it on the shelf, and not have to take any back to the stock room. For our medium size product, 6-packs and 12-packs (for 6 of two different colors) seem reasonable.

If the store is a chain, then they would want to take a master carton, open that up, and send out a 6-pack or a 12-pack to their individual stores. A master carton of 24 would be excessive packaging, while a master carton of 108 may be a bit too much.

Ideally, I would have liked to pack 72 into a master carton. I drew out the geometry for that and was quite excited. Unfortunately, when I calculated the final sizing, I figured out that it would be too big. FedEx and UPS both have calculations for what they consider an over-sized box. If the length + 2 (width+height) > 84 inches, then it's oversized. They charge a minimum of 30 pounds worth of stuff for oversized packages, regardless of how much the package actually weights. 72 SleepPhones would weigh about 16-18 pounds. So I nixed that design.

Then I looked into packages of 60 pieces. It would fit in just under the oversized box limit, and it would be easy to carry. It's a nice even number, so people could order 300 pieces or 600 pieces. I did all of the calculations for that, and the final 60-pack box size would be about 31” x 14” x 12”. I took that information and tried to stack it onto a pallet. If someone order 1200 pieces, I'd need to put the boxes on a pallet for easier unloading. (It wouldn't be easier loading since we don't have a forklift, but we could just put the boxes onto a pallet in a truck if necessary.) I tried every configuration I could, and the size was just so awkward for a pallet! A typical wooden pallet is 40” x 48” x 5” and weighs about 15 pounds. The 31” length wasted lots of space around the edges of the pallet. So I finally had to give up that design.

The next design is for 48 pieces in a master carton. I shortened the inner cartons to make it fit, but I finally got a 24” x 14” x 12” box. That meant I could have two 24” boxes side by side on a pallet, so there wouldn't be wasted space. And if I turned the box on its side, I could have 3 rows of that. 6 boxes per level, 4 levels total, for a total height of 61”. 24 boxes would be 1152 pieces per pallet, a pretty good number.

I draw up everything and was about to send it off to our adviser. Then I learned from a box expert that the corrugation on cardboard determines its strength. If the warehouse were to put another pallet on top of our pallet, it would need to withstand a lot of downward force. When I turned the box on its side to fit it onto a pallet, the corrugation would no longer be straight up and down. So...I had to swap the width and height to get it to work. I re-drew the boxes.

Packaging Lessons Part 2

For the great packaging design, we approached a local print shop to get thousands of these printed. (We're optimistic about holiday sales.) I have been waiting to get these pretty ones in so we could ship some out to Art Van Furniture stores in Michigan. They placed an order earlier in the week.

I stopped by on Monday, and they said they'd have things ready by Friday. On Thursday, they call me up and ask if I can check the proof. So I rush over during lunch to make sure the sizing was correct for the package. They tell me they will try to have them ready for Friday. On Friday, I was on edge all day, waiting for their call, which finally came at 4:30 to say that they were printed but not dry. Without them, we couldn't spend the weekend packing like I had planned. So I wait until Monday. They called up and said that the color wasn't right and asked if we could stop by again. So we went over (3^rd time) to check, and it was too blue. So we wait until Tuesday for a reprint. Late in the afternoon, I drive over again to pick up what they had. It was printed and cut, but not folded. So I only picked up a hundred pieces. That night, we folded, packed, and shipped 7 boxes. On Wednesday, instead of making me drive out a 5^th time, they offered to send their courier van to drop them off. I waited all day long because we just received another order, and I was about to give up when the doorbell finally rang at 5pm.

While it is ultimately less expensive to have the printers do large printings, it was certainly a lot of hassle. We have been using our own laser printer with nice HP paper to do most of the printing up until this point.

Packaging Lessons Part 1

Who would have thought that packaging is so involved? As complete newbies into the world of business, we're constantly learning new things. This series of posts discuss SleepPhones packaging design.

For retail sales, we have these pretty polypropylene packs that keep SleepPhones nice and fresh. Retailers probably care more about packaging than they do the actual product. That is the first thing I've learned. If the package is really cool, the product will move off the shelves, which means money for the retailer. If the package doesn't sell the product, then it may just sit there forever, collecting dust. Customer don't buy dusty products. And retailers will just return the unsold stuff to manufacturers.

We're in a few small retail stores, and up until recently, I've been doing the graphic design. It's not hideous, but it's not pretty and certainly not professional. So we had a local graphic designer friend fix up the insert that goes on the front to sell the product. We knew about her in our network of local Twitter friends. She was a friend to many of my friends, but I had never met her. But given that her Twitter name had CMYK in it, I figured she probably cared a lot about good print design. I gave her some material to work with, and she turned out a beautiful design! I think we made the right choice.