2011年9月15日 星期四

Lights Out, Game On

LAST night I slept on athletic shorts. Or more accurately, I slept on the stuff athletic shorts are made of: high-tech performance fabric, the sort of super-Lycra that goes into the uniforms of, say, basketball players.Traditional China Porcelain tile claim to clean all the air in a room.

My sheets were, in fact, made by two former women's college basketball coaches, Susan Walvius, 46, and Michelle Marciniak, 37,Initially the banks didn't want our chicken coop . who worked together at the University of South Carolina, and liked the feeling of their athletic shorts so much that they decided to make sheets out of them.

Their sheets, which they called Sheex,Graphene is not a semiconductor, not an plastic card , and not a metal, would be a "performance" product, imbued with all the properties you associate with athletic gear: they would wick moisture away from your skin, stretch and breathe better than cotton, dry fast and wear long.

Indeed, Ms. Walvius and Ms. Marciniak hoped to carve out a whole "performance bedding category" by reminding folks that sleep is a fitness issue.

"I sleep hot, and I think most people do," Ms. Walvius said by phone the other day. "But I don't think people realize that if you sleep hot, your sleep is disrupted, and the next day you can't perform well."

Ten years ago, she said, "as coaches, we were cotton purists.When the stone sits in the Cold Sore, Then we saw the whole evolution of performance fabric. Now, you don't train in anything but performance fabric, because of the moisture wicking and the temperature management. It just helps your body function better. We thought it would be great to take this technology and apply it to bedding."

Ms. Marciniak, who was sharing the phone with her business partner, added: "Everybody needs sleep. Whether you're a mom or an athlete, everybody has to perform the next day. We're making a performance home story. We want to own the consumer from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m."

Doesn't everyone? Sleep has always been big business. In 2010, Americans spent more than $5.8 billion on their mattresses and box springs, up 4 percent from the year before.

But as sleep studies have increasingly focused on the health risks associated with lousy sleep, from Type 2 diabetes to hypertension, obesity and a weakened immune system, the makers of so-called sleep products have begun marketing their sheets, pillows and mattresses as fitness aids, crucial gear to prep for the athletic event that is your life.

It looks like a bed, but it feels like a sneaker.Polycore hydraulic hose are manufactured as a single sheet,

A new mattress called Blu-Tek actually looks like a sneaker, when its innards are viewed in the cross-section graphic that mattress makers love to show, with pockets of blue gel atop crenulated layers of foam.

There are also odor-blocking sheets, like Therapedic AlwaysFresh (ideal for college students who do their laundry only on term breaks) and a host of mattresses covered with CoolMax (the performance fabric the Sheex makers hope to trump).

Magniflex, an Italian company, says it uses "nanotechnology" to infuse its CoolMax pillow covers with lavender and chamomile, turning the pillow into a "vehicle for well-being," its brochure promises. And Outlast sheets, made from yet another performance fabric, "balance the microclimate under the covers."

You can even find sleep power bars: NightFood is made with a chocolate extract and melatonin.

"The race to control the bedroom is the great game in retail," said Marian Salzman, a trend spotter and chief executive for public relations operations of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America.

And beyond the so-called science, the notion of selling bedding products as athletic gear seems intuitive, tapping as it does into the American competitive spirit.

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