Top Sleep Trends of 2023

The trend of taping one's mouth shut at night in order to gain a better sleep and reduce dry mouth, snoring, and throat soreness is gradually making its way to the mainstream, and manufacturers are beginning to cash in with "sleep strips" which are essentially just branded strips of tape priced at enormous markups.

While American consumers are increasingly looking for DIY healthcare solutions, many will also likely have safety concerns about using conventional tape on their mouths at night, fearing they may stop breathing. Companies offering peace of mind can charge a premium — so much so that "sleep strips" are priced at 20-100x more than paper tape on Amazon, despite the two products being functionally the same.

The trend echoes several other popular healthcare products that originated as DIY tools, including the Theragun and Hypervolt, whose brand-name products can sell for $400 or more, mitigating consumers' fears of being harmed by a (much cheaper) homemade device.

Blackout curtains have grown in popularity nearly exponentially over the past 4 decades, but their peak popularity, and when they were in fact invented, was actually at the height of WWII – for fascinating reasons.

Ironically, they were invented to keep light from escaping, not the other way around as they’re used today. Without sophisticated tracking systems, German aircraft relied on sight during bombing runs and so the European Allies instituted blackouts and recommended blackout curtains. With a completely dark city, the German bomber planes struggled to see where to drop their bombs and many historians credit millions of lives saved to the blackout efforts.

Today, blackout curtains are common among consumers. And as lights get cheaper and more widespread (LED prices dropped nearly 98% over the past decade alone), darkness is turning into a luxury: 99% of the population experiences a noticeable level of light pollution, and it’s rising at around 2% per year. Already, one-third of the global population cannot see the Milky Way.

Abundant screens at home and light pollution outside make it harder than ever to get complete darkness. As sales of sleep masks and blackout curtains have risen, and consumers are used to darkness even after the sun rises, the camping world has been forced to adapt by offering blackout tents.

One of the biggest complaints about camping is getting a poor night’s sleep. By solving for sleep quality with blackout tents, multinational camping brands like Coleman are removing a large bottleneck to camping adoption and unlocking a much larger market to whom they can sell their line of camping gear.

Now, tent manufacturers are expanding their business even further to an unexpected source: parents are putting their babies in tents - when traveling - to help them sleep.

On Reddit and other forums, parents commonly complain of needing to cover the windows so their babies sleep better when traveling. And sellers are able to charge an additional baby premium: companies like SlumberPod price at 40% more, on average, and sales are growing rapidly.

Bamboo sheets have been a growing trend for years but bamboo pajamas have just recently started growing in popularity. They are a cheaper solution: enough bamboo fabric to cover a person once instead of a bed twice.

45% of couples report arguing over sleeping temperature so products that let individuals choose their own preferred temperature help resolve the issue. Given its unique property of wicking moisture, bamboo clothing can help keep body temperatures stable throughout the night. Bamboo pajama brands are leaning into this and running ads promising to help reduce sleep-related conflict.

Bamboo fabric is also pitched as environmentally friendly compared to cotton. Bamboo requires little water, the plants grow back after getting cut down, and they don’t need pesticides. As more consumers start making environmentally conscious decisions, existing products can be rebuilt using more eco-friendly materials.

A huge portion of US online sales, at some point, touch 1 of 3 players: either Google’s ads, Facebook’s ads, or Amazon’s marketplace. But all 3 ban CBD, making it challenging for CBD sellers to do basic online marketing.

Although CBD was rising, it peaked in 2019. Today, CBN, a subcomponent of THC, is able to bypass these limitations as it’s not listed as a schedule 1 drug.

While still very early and low volume compared to CBD, CBN is growing at a rapid rate. Searches for CBN gummies grew nearly 3X over the past 12 months and is most commonly used for sleep as a substitute for Melatonin, the supplement consumers spent over a billion dollars on last year.

More broadly, the rise of gummies as a form factor for supplements has a fascinating backstory with roundabout roots: marijuana legalization. As more states effectively legalized recreational marijuana, the market expanded—but new customers weren’t necessarily interested in smoking, so dispensaries started offering other delivery mechanisms, like gummies. Gummies are fairly easy to make, and the sugar and other flavorings can cover up less pleasant tastes. This created a category of gummies that a) had an active ingredient other than sugar, and b) could only be purchased by adults.

An increasingly common theme is the reformatting of physical products: Rather than buying a sauna, many consumers are buying sauna blankets. And rather than turning the air conditioner all the way up at night, many are resorting to cooling blankets.

When it comes to hair care, consumers are increasingly looking to sleep on softer materials like silk and satin which can reduce friction on the hair when tossing and turning. This leads to less static electricity which means less frizz, and less of a “bed head” look upon waking.

But while many sleep and bedding brands are focused on sheets made of these materials, others are behind the increasingly popular sleep bonnet - a soft hair covering worn while sleeping. Like sauna blankets, sleep bonnets are a localized solution to the problem: instead of buying satin or silk sheets and pillowcases, it’s just a single covering over the hair.

And while some products sell utility, others sell optionality: they don't necessarily let you do something new, but they give you more flexibility around when you do things. Sleep bonnets partly fit into this category: they let consumers schedule their hair care routines for the evening, without worrying that their efforts will be wasted the next morning. This turns hair care from a time-sensitive chore to a way to relax at the end of the day. It's in the same category as meal prep, soylent, and programmable coffee machines—a way to shift certain activities to a time when there's less pressure to get things done fast.

For millions of listeners, LoFi music is the soundtrack to their workdays, study sessions, and sleep. But the phenomenon isn't just about the beats — there's a fascinating backstory to the trend's rise in popularity.

The mellow, ambient sounds owe their ascent in part to a change YouTube and Spotify made to their ranking algorithms, which started to prioritize the watch/listen duration as a proxy for engagement, rather than just looking at likes and clicks. This gave an advantage to content that users could press "play" on and let go for hours on end, like "lo-fi for working/relaxing/studying" playlists and livestreams.

Top LoFi hip-hop YouTube channels have racked up millions of subscribers by offering endless loops of music to help relax, work, and study, often through 24-hour livestream radio channels. Spotify's wide array of "chill" playlists likewise promises to help ease stress and be unobtrusive enough to leave on all day.

The channels have carved out a niche as a middle option between FM radio — where stations are highly regulated and manned 24/7 — and Spotify or Apple Music's algorithmically generated playlists.