Goblin Hour: The Product We Thought Would Change Our Business (And Lives)

Before the Nap Dress

One of the hardest and most important things I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is this:

You have to constantly let go of what you think should work, in favor of what actually does work.

Doing that well requires both intense sensitivity — to your customers, your community, your reality — and humility. One product, one launch, one Instagram comment doesn’t define you.

For my whole life, I’ve taken things seriously. Painfully, earnestly seriously. In 8th grade, I truly believed that my diorama of Scout Finch’s bedroom was a triumph in 3D literary criticism. In business school, I built 18-column, color-coded spreadsheets to study for accounting quizzes. I’ve been overdressed at every event I’ve ever attended. I’m just… not chill! I overheard someone calling me a try-hard in my early twenties and I was so confused… “is that like, a bad thing?!”

I’ve had no choice but to embrace my try-hard tendencies, and they’ve served me well in entrepreneurship. Starting something from scratch requires absolute delusion: despite all the odds against you, you try hard anyway, because you’re convinced it’ll work. In those early Hill House days, our little team had enough delusion to power an army.

Our team never did “light” or “easy.’ We would go into a launch so convinced that a product was going to be life-changing—and we were very often wrong. Sometimes it was a total flop. Sometimes it lingered on artificial life support in the form of cute Instagram pics. But the greatest gift we had (and I hope we still do) was our ability to let go when the evidence told us something just wasn’t working.

Over time, we’ve gotten better at predicting what will work—but more importantly, we’ve become better at reading what’s working in real time, and responding. It’s a muscle we’ve trained with many, many reps (yes I’m an athlete thank you for noticing).

So today, I thought I’d share one of our favorite product flops from the pre-Nap Dress era. It was a launch we poured months into… and sold exclusively to our own mothers.

Introducing: The Sleep Kit

It was summer 2018. Our tiny team was getting ready for the holiday season at our Bleecker Street store—a space we’d poured every dollar into instead of investing in digital ads.

At that stage in the business, we all worked retail at the store at least a few days a week. The holidays were our Olympics. There was no rush like a crazy Saturday at 395 Bleecker—packing pillowcases, tying ribbons, sprinting around to find the last monogrammed robe in size M. We wanted to create “grab and go” gifts: things that were already wrapped, worked for anyone, and sat at a giftable price point ($75–$200). Since our brand had always been rooted in sleep and the bedroom—long before the Nap Dress—we landed on an idea we were excited about:

A “Sleep Kit.”

All the ingredients for a perfect, relaxing night in.

We imagined it would include a lavender essential oil roll-on, bath salts, and our bestselling silk eye mask embroidered with one of our signature cheeky phrases (more on those in a future post). We chose “I am busy” in our script font. We tested and mocked up endlessly. At one point, I decided the bath salts should be in reusable sachets printed with quotes about sleep from famous authors. I spent a month researching and narrowing down those quotes, searching Goodreads and Jstor for hidden gems (I’ll list them below!)

Eventually, we got the kits just right. We ordered 100 of them—which was a huge buy for us at the time—and placed them gently on the shelves at Bleecker. We were used to slow burns. So we waited.

Our moms? Obsessed. Everyone else? Crickets.

It was such a clear flop that it was actually easy to let go. We didn’t feel defensive — it just didn’t work! I don’t regret it at all. The early products, and especially the flops, were training. They built our resilience, sharpened our instincts, and helped us inch closer to what does actually work.

So I’m glad we did it! Being wrong is the greatest gift in entrepreneurship, ESPECIALLY at the beginning when things are lower stakes: your team is smaller, community smaller, reach smaller, inventory buys smaller. Being wrong gives you incredibly useful information—like sonar, bouncing off the wall of what your customers actually want.

More than anything else, I think the skill that’s served us best at Hill House is our sensitivity to feedback—especially the feedback no one says out loud.

We didn’t always get it right, but we always paid attention.

Anybody want to buy 97 Sleep Kits?