I didn't set out to study pillows.

It started as my own problem

Like a lot of inventions, this one began selfishly. I couldn't get comfortable. I didn't have a vocabulary for what was wrong — only the feeling that my head wasn't being supported the way it needed to be, and that buying yet another pillow hadn't fixed it.

So I started experimenting. Folded towels, stacked layers, small props tucked underneath. Crude, but informative: what changed the experience most wasn't the pillow's softness. It was how high my head sat, and where the support actually landed.

That experiment became Crown Lift®

Eventually the makeshift version wasn't good enough, and I designed something proper: Crown Lift®, an insert system that changes the lift underneath the head instead of replacing the pillow. I founded Sanctuary Sleep LLC to build it.

I expected that to be the end of the story. It was closer to the beginning.

Then I started working with real people

Once I put the product in front of others, the pattern I kept running into was this: pillows are sold in categories — soft, medium, firm, side sleeper, back sleeper — and humans do not arrive in categories. Shoulder width, neck length, mattress softness, how much someone moves at night, whether they wear a CPAP mask: all of it varies enormously.

Which raised an obvious question I couldn't let go of. If people vary this much, shouldn't support be adjustable to the person rather than sorted into a bin?

Which led me to measuring

I wanted to see what was happening, not guess at it. That's what pushed me toward pressure mapping and contact-area observation, and eventually to setting up the Pillow Lab: a place to measure, watch, compare and ask better questions.

I still don't have all the answers. I'm comfortable saying "I don't know yet" — as long as I'm doing something about it.

See what the Pillow Lab is looking at →