First of all, welcome and thank you for visiting the Cool Embrace website. Many people ask us how Cool Embrace started and the story behind the invention of our blankets and pillowcases that stop you getting night sweats. It all started with a husband who wanted to give his wife relief from her menopausal night sweats with a solution that helped keep her cool all night, every night without the use of chemicals and medication and didn’t cost the earth. With a background in tailoring and fabrics for various uses, including military projects, global companies as well as everyday innovations, Steve came up with the unique combination of layered fabric that makes Cool Embrace bedding an effective and long lasting solution to combat night sweats. Read Lisa & Steve’s stories below and get to know the personal love story that started this whole thing off…
Hi there, I want to tell you a love story. I’m sure that’s not what you expected to hear when you started reading this, but the story of the Cool Embrace Blanket is, in fact, a love story. Now I’m not going to go into all of the menopause issues; I’m sure if you’re reading this, you’ve probably had quite a few of them yourself. I’m just going to focus on the issue that caused me a lot of problems and had a huge knock-on effect on my everyday life, and that is Night Sweats.
The problem is I would wake up several times a night soaked to the skin with sweat – so much so that I had to change my night clothes. It also woke me up so many times that I was exhausted by the time morning came around and it started to get so that I couldn’t function properly during the day at all.
I would then stumble on into the evening and all I had to look forward to at night was more of the same. I was at my wit’s end. Hey, hang on a minute I hear you say, you promised me a love story. You’re right, I did, and this is where my hero comes into it, my husband Steve saw how much I was suffering and couldn’t bear it. He saw that the woman he loved was disappearing in front of his eyes into exhaustion and depression.
Luckily for me, Steve is an inventor and scientist and he was determined to create something that would help me, and so the Cool Embrace Blanket was born. I’ll leave it to him to tell you exactly how he did it, but for me, it was nothing short of a miracle. The very first evening I tried the prototype blanket I slept right through the night with no night sweats at all. I know! Bizarre! I was completely amazed. How could this be, and why hadn’t anybody else come up with this blanket already? Now you may think I’m a bit soppy, but I know exactly why it hadn’t happened before. This was the first time that Science was mixed with Love, and without that secret ingredient then science was just trying to solve a problem and so the stakes were not high enough. Love raised the bar, and the Cool Embrace Blanket was created. Now, my hero can become your hero too, as this is something that has to be shared with the world
My Wife, Laura, calls this a love story, and I guess it probably is, but I’m not sure about all that soppy stuff myself. I just knew it was unbearable watching her suffer and I had to do something about it. Thankfully I’m a fabric technician and I’ve worked extensively with fabrics all my life. I thought there must be a way to create a fabric that will move the heat away from the body, rather than settle as sweat. As I started to work on this issue, I remembered that I’d worked on something similar years ago. It was nothing to do with women and menopause, it was to do with soldiers perspiring due to heavy workloads.
Over 40 years ago the company I worked for at the time was then given this as a problem to solve. I started working on it, getting amazing results in the lab, but at the time, they would not translate to the field. Then the project was shelved and I was pulled away to work on something else.
I remembered the work I did back then and wondered if the overheating was due to the body being enclosed in clothing. In 2022, I started making and testing samples. After noting the results and making changes, I had my Eureka moment – it was all to do with heat dissipation. It didn’t really matter how much heat was produced but how that heat could be moved away from the body. So I had to create a unique fabric that could do exactly that, move the heat away from the body and disperse it over a much larger surface area. It was then that the Cool Embrace Blanket was born.
Even though I invented it and knew it would work, I was blown away by the speed and efficiency of the heat dissipation. After only 1 night under the Cool Embrace prototype, we both had a good night’s sleep. I can’t tell you how good that felt, knowing that I had helped Laura sleep well and begin to regain her mental and physical balance. So I guess she was right after all, it is a love story.
Of course, Laura being the kind, caring person she is said, “you’ve got to share this with everyone– it’s going to make such a huge difference to so many women’s lives”. So we began the testing process and handed out blankets to other women to test for us, and we are getting the same response back – everyone loves the blankets and they are changing lives.