From Hockey Rinks to Weighted Blankets: My Unconventional Path

Hey hey,

When people find out I’ve built a multi-million-dollar brand around weighted blankets, they always ask the same thing: 

“Dude, how’d you get here?”

Truth is, I never planned on becoming “the blanket guy.” 

My big dream growing up was to play professional hockey. While that didn’t fully pan out, playing sports at a competitive level taught me some of the most valuable lessons in discipline, time management, and pushing through discomfort. 

It also gave me a taste of the adrenaline you get when you’re hyper-focused on a goal–something I later found in entrepreneurship.

In my early 20s, I jumped into a few smaller businesses. Some took off briefly, many fell flat, but every single one taught me something crucial about building a brand people actually believe in. 

Eventually, my co-founder Lior and I zeroed in on the sleep and anxiety space–and that’s when everything clicked. We saw a major gap: people wanted better rest, but the solutions out there felt cheap or gimmicky. We doubled down on R&D, focusing on top-of-the-line materials and real mental health benefits.

Don’t let this quick recap fool you–it was anything but smooth sailing. We had factory mishaps, clueless marketing experiments that ate our budget, and days we thought we might shut down before ever “making it.” But every challenge forced us to refine our product, our message, and our mission.

And that mission is bigger than blankets. It was about helping people feel calmer and sleep easier. Yeah, we pitched it in D2C style, but behind every sale is someone who might finally get a full night’s rest after years of tossing and turning. That’s what kept me going.

In Wednesdays’s email, I’ll dive deeper into one of the scariest moments in HUSH’s history–the exact point we thought we were done for. Spoiler alert: we weren’t.

Hang tight,
Aaron