🤝 Meet Lauren Sudeyko. She’s the founder of Sleep or Die, a buzzy Canadian sleep-tech company that specializes in sleep supplement strips. We sat down with Lauren to talk about building a self-proclaimed “sexy” sleep business and how a cycling accident set Sleep or Die in motion.
What’s your elevator pitch for Sleep or Die?
Sleep or Die exists to revolutionize the sleep industry, and we're innovating it in two parts. One, format — an innovative style of supplement in a Listerine-strip style. All sleep aids right now exist from bigger companies that just kind of offshoot sleep into a similar format in pills, powders, and gummies. All three of those formats take 45 minutes to hit your system. We started it from a sleep-first perspective. The reason those three formats have so many pain points is you have to digest them so they take long, but also they often have sugar in them when it comes to gummies, or the liquid you need to consume to take some of the powder sachets. You're drinking all of this before you go to bed and then you're waking up to pee at 2 o'clock in the morning. Versus with strips, they work in 10 minutes. They have rapid absorption, the right balance of ingredients so that you can fall asleep and not feel hungover the next day when you wake up.
The second part of it is the branding, and really leaning into a very different approach when it comes to sleep. Sleep is a very frustrating thing to struggle with, and the way the industry currently represents it is using this outdated playbook of lavender, flowers, and people smiling in bed, and it's just not the reality. It doesn't matter how well you eat or how much you exercise if you aren't sleeping — it's the most important part of your wellness and longevity. So we wanted to reframe it in the stream to a flip-top.
You started having sleep troubles after a cycling accident. How did that personal need translate to launching a business?
I think that like any great founder, going through something they've struggled with for a long time and then wanting to change the world around them based on what they've gone through. Struggling with sleep is something that's really hard to solve, and often you're just directed towards prescription medication. For me, I just was struggling with sleep after the accident, and when you have a concussion, you get prescribed something right away. It wasn't working, I couldn't wake up in the morning.
I really wanted to find a solution. When I started talking to girlfriends around me we realized that when it comes to your sleep, everyone was taking something. Some of them were taking Advil PM every night, melatonin, everything you can imagine. So it just turned into: we're all taking something, but we all hate what we're taking. That created a lot of white space for me to create something that women would look forward to.
You started with sleepwear brand Seray. What made you pivot from that to sleep strips and sleep tape?
I love Seray. It was my first ever foray into entrepreneurship, and I learned so much. I just think it wasn't what I wanted to create in the world, but it was where I learned a lot. So many businesses, when they close, it's obviously really difficult, but for me, I knew what I was running towards. I was leaving something behind and running towards this, so it allowed me to have more fun with it.
Even when I launched Sleep or Die, it took time to figure out what it was going to look like, what it was going to feel like. And then we launched with mouth tape to generate revenue in order to do R&D on strips, because it was so expensive for supplements. I had to have money coming in from a product that was simple to make — being mouth tape — to then be able to get R&D running. We did R&D for almost a year, so it was all the moving pieces at once.
What's the more popular product between the tape and the strips?
About 80% of our revenue now is from strips. It's our hero for everything that we do with the business. And that's why we say “welcome to the strip club” and our customers who use them are called "strippers." We really lean into it at all levels.
How did Sleep or Die’s tongue-in-cheek marketing come to be?
It just spoke back to that same insight that sleep is frustrating and dark, and what if we made it fun? I think in creative I want to look at opposing feelings — sleep is frustrating and tiresome and lonely, but you could never feel sexy when you're feeling tired, you could never feel rebellious or confident when you're feeling lonely. So if we could win on those feelings, we would essentially obliterate the other feelings. That's how we framed it.
I think creative is way more important than the business side, because the business will figure itself out as long as there’s demand, which comes from creative. That was the experience with this product. I thought okay, it comes as a strip, we could call our customers "strippers." We just submitted our trademark about a month ago for "Welcome to the Strip Club."
You’ve said that smoking is back in a big way — which partly inspired your packaging — but that it’s more of a rebellion against a certain type of wellness culture. How do sleep tape and strips fit into that equation?
I think it alludes back to that same theme: the sleep category is exhausted. It's the same lavender-whispering flavour that's been used for the last 20-30 years. For us, it was really about how we can stand up differently and have a rebellious approach, while also being very truthful in our copy as a brand. If you don't sleep enough, you're just going to die younger — that's the truth. On the flip side, it was: where would you never find a sleep product? In a cigarette box. And where would you never think of making sleep sexy? So the more we leaned into that, the more it all started to come together.
When we launched in January, the box was a lot of the reason why we went viral initially. I posted the box on LinkedIn, and it went to 200,000 people in a week. That's also where our venture capital investor sent us a DM — they had been seeing that post. And then we raised $1 million.
What would you say to someone that's skeptical of trying something like mouth tape or supplement strips?
At the end of the day, you gotta do what's best for you, and if you don't want it, then we're not for you. I would just say look at your sleep habits, look at what feels good, look at what you're struggling with. If you wake up in the middle of the night and your mouth is dry, you'd be a great candidate for pairing these products together. Mouth tape is great for a lot of reasons: it calms your body down before you go to bed, it really elicits nose breathing, which filters the oxygen in your body, and it just leads to a healthier lifestyle. The strips are really just for you to be able to fall asleep better. The most important thing for sleep is going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, but none of us are doing that. If you're staying up until 11 on a Friday, that's already shot. So it's about not sleep-maxing and over-optimizing. We want to really meet people in the reality of their daily habits — like at nine on a Sunday when you're trying to go to bed and you're wide awake, we have a solution for that. It's about not expecting people to change their lives, but being there to plug into their current lifestyle.
Other than tape and strips, do you have any trade secrets to getting a solid eight hours of shut-eye?
Going to bed and waking up at the same time every day is huge, truly the most important thing. A cool, dark room is extremely important. Your body temperature has to drop for you to be able to fall asleep, so if you're in a hot space, it makes it way harder for your body to actually sleep. Small things can go a really long way like earplugs or making your bedroom an oasis. You can’t go too far though, because then some people become so over-optimized that they can't travel.
Are there any new products on the horizon?
Yes, we're launching a new product in a month. It's a non-melatonin sleep aid. And that’s as much as I can share right now.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. If you want to give it a shot for yourself, The Peak readers get $10 off right now with code thepeak.
