Sustainable Slumber: Sharon Stuart's Vision for BedVoyage

Sure. Yeah, my name is Sharon Stuart . I’m the CEO of BedVoyage. We are a bamboo bedding bath baby linen manufacturer located in Washington state. My background was actually in escrow in real estate closings. So I owned an escrow company for about 28 years. I travelled a lot for fun at that time and I’ve been a sheet snob my entire life.

So I was always picky about the linens I’m sleeping on. And I like to stay anywhere from a nice hotel to just kind of a fun dive bar motel on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. But if you look at some of the linens in some of those lower end places, you could pretty much see through them. And the towels felt like sandpaper. So I thought, you know, I wonder if I could create a set of linens I could take with me when I travel, especially if you’re staying in a hotel where it’s a well-used pillow, well-used mattress, right? So I created a patent pending design. Think of old waterbed sheets where the fitted sheet was connected at the foot of the bed to the flat sheet. And then the pillowcases had a zipper. So you could put the hotel pillow in, zip it closed and feel like you’ve really got a safe, secure, clean place to sleep.

And that’s why the company is called BedVoyage is because we design travel sheets. Well, when we did that, we launched at a travel writers convention in Ireland, which was very fun because it just so happened that right when I was getting my products in, I had a press agent at that time that invited me to go to that event. And then we started going to travel industry trade shows. So we were selling the product like crazy but, I started asking people, are you buying these because of the feel of bamboo? Because here’s what we did. I should back up a little bit about how I stumbled across bamboo. In trying to find a sheet that we could take with us on our travels, I was looking at all kinds of fabrics that had natural antibacterial, natural odour resistant, mildew resistant. I’ve even been bit by bed bugs on a cruise ship. So I’m looking for a fabric that can keep everything out.

Bamboo was one that I stumbled across and it had a lot more natural benefits than just those. It’s really good for people to sleep hot. It’s cooling. It’s got micro gaps and holes in the fibres that let heat through. So, so many benefits, hypoallergenic, really good for people that suffer from eczema or any kind of skin conditions.

So again, back to trade shows. I’m talking to people about, are you buying these because of the feel of bamboo or because this is a unique design? Virtually everybody said, I’m buying these because of the feel of this bamboo. It’s amazing, never felt anything like it. So we immediately thought, okay, the travel niche industry is like this.

But the traditional bed linen industry is huge. Let’s just morph into traditional bed linens instead of trying to go after this tiny industry. So we then added duvet covers and towels and blankets and coverlets and shams and quite a few items to our line. And at those travel trade show conventions, we started talking to other e-comm retailers. That’s when we really got into e -comm.

was they said, well, can we carry your product line on our website? And that was kind of our goal was to get our product on to a lot of e -comm sites, which we now have done. We’re on Macy’s and Target and Overstock and Nordstrom and JCPenney and Amazon, Wayfair, you know, just most of the big ones. But in the very beginning, nobody knew what Bamboo was.

So what we decided to do was we partnered with Costco and we did trade shows. So if you walk in through Costco and somebody’s like, would you like a bite of this or would you like to see this knife or whatever, that’s called a road show. So we did road shows across the country for 10 years and we would have a sales rep standing there introducing people to bamboo and they were quite surprised. Everybody thought, oh, it must be scratchy and hard, you know, it’s from a tree. And then they’d feel it and say, wow.
So that was how we really kind of spread the brand BedVoyage across the country.

Our demographic is interesting because in general, it is women aged 35 to 70. But we get a lot of orders from men as well. I think that’s particularly our towel line. They kind of think about us with our bath sheets and our towels. They buy our bed linens as well. So age range, we tend to go towards the market that finds us, are the people that are looking for eco luxury, sustainable, sustainable alternative to cotton. Cotton sheets take a tremendous amount of toxic chemicals to grow, produce and turn into the fabric. So people that are wanting natural benefits from a linen that they’re sleeping on are the ones that are kind of finding us.
And our target audience would be just people that want to come to our website, as well as hospitality. So we have a boutique cruise line that orders all of their linens for us because as they travel from port to port, they throw their linens in the hold and they were losing about 30 % of their linens to mildew that was happening in the hold and bamboo is mildew resistant. So they’re not losing their linens. We also do eco resorts in Costa Rica, Mexico, small inns and boutiques, we’ve done a few hotel lines, and then designers. So we’ve got quite a handful of designers across the country that purchase our products when they’re doing a design job for their clients.

I would say it’s a few things. So first we can talk about how long we’ve been doing this. I started the company in 2008 and any bamboo company that has come up that you see on the industry has come up after us. We were the first bamboo bedding to the consumer, selling to the consumer. So again, nobody even knew what bamboo was at the time that we first started.
We also are not the cheap knockoff Chinese, you know, when you go to like a street fair and they say, oh, we have bamboo sheets for $49, but you hold them up to the light and you can see through them and they’re gonna literally shred and fall apart after two or three washings. That’s not us. We have really high quality.
Our manufacturer is in India and we work with only highly, highly certified mills that have all the Oeko Tex Standard 100, Made in Green, STEP, LEED certified using sustainable green energies. They passed this SMITA, which is the Social Responsibility Audit, where they anonymously have their employees interviewed to make sure that they’re being paid fair wages, they’re not being overworked, etcetera. And then also, just in reference to the product itself.

Many of the other bamboo bedding companies out there are a blend. So we are 100 % bamboo. They might be a blend of 60 % cotton, 40 % bamboo, or they have a lower thread count. Our thread count for bamboo is 300. It’s very high. And we use a very tight twill weave, which prevents pilling. So if you’ve ever slept on sheets that get those nubby balls on them and scratch you when you’re sleeping, that’s what cheap sheets do.

So we really hold ourselves to a higher standard than a lot of our competitors. And then we have a wide variety of products, as I mentioned. We’ve got baby linens from crib sheets to swaddles to baby towels, to coverlets and bath sheets and regular towels, duvet covers, sheet sets, and many of our competitors don’t have that variety of products to offer.

Absolutely. Yeah, sure. We started about four years ago with another line called Melange. Melange is a very unique blend of 50 % bamboo and 50 % cotton. And the way that they do it is they dye the cotton fibre, like dye it black, and then the bamboo fibre is white. And when they weave it together, it creates this texture look that’s really interesting, and it’s bleachable.

And this is a lower priced product line. So we kind of say to people, if you’re wanting to dip your toe in the bamboo pool, but bamboo sheets are too expensive, try our line that is the lower price line, the 50 % cotton, 50 % bamboo. It’s also more of a kind of a comfy, cosier feel. The 100 % line is our ultimate luxury line, silky smooth. They look like silk. They’re extremely elegant, very high end.

And the melange line is what maybe a younger person or somebody who just doesn’t want to spend $230 on a sheet set. They’ll buy our $120 sheet set.

Challenges would definitely be competing against the cheap China sheets. Like for instance, that are on Amazon, we’re on Amazon as well. So if somebody sees that we have a $229 King sheet set price, and then there’s some China name company that’s selling them for 70, it’s very difficult to explain to people who are just price shopping, right? They’re just looking at price. We need to explain to them.

You get what you pay for. Like I’m somebody that has always bought quality. In fact, when I met my husband, it made him crazy because my furniture weighs like a million tons. When we move, he’s like, oh my God, we have to move that dining table again because I buy quality and then I say, I’m buying it once. I’m not buying it multiple times and throwing them away because it wears out.

So we try to explain to people that, one we’re a USA brand so you’re gonna be able to phone us and someone will talk to you on the phone. Try doing that with a China brand on Amazon. We really care about our customers. We have a huge, very loyal customer base that has been really good for us. Sometimes the bigger challenge in e-comm would be to find the buyer at a large retail outlet like, you know, when you’re trying to get your line listed at Dillard’s, trying to find the betting buyer of an e -comm, they’re very privately held. You can’t just call up Dillard’s corporate and say, could I talk to the betting buyer? You’re not going to get them. So you have to figure out interesting ways, like not lead lists per se, but there are some like rocket reach and the salesman’s guide.

Those are two online resources that you can subscribe to and the chances are pretty good like 60 % that you’re going to actually get the correct name and contact information for the buyer of the department you’re looking for. So that’s a tip for any other e -comm brands out there that are trying to figure out how to get into some of these larger retail stores.

Another issue is for instance we offer maps pricing to our online accounts. So we offer 10 % off to them. So on our site, we’re selling it at retail. So that is a little bit of a dichotomy. You know, there are, we’re letting our big retail brands sell at a slightly lower price than we are. So then people are coming to us because they either want to buy directly from the brand. They want good customer service. They don’t mind paying a little bit more. And then of course, when we do promotions, we’re able to promote a deeper discount than we would on our larger retail stores.

We’ve been talking to American mills and we would very much like to be made in America but much of the bamboo, the yarns actually come from overseas so even if we found a mill in America which we’ve been talking to a couple about creating our linens here they actually have to order the yarns from India.

It’s interesting because we just don’t manufacture bamboo yarns in America. You can find paper products. There are some like literally toilet paper products, writing paper products that are made from bamboo, but there are no, there’s no bamboo farms here. Speaking of that, if I can mention, we’d like to say that our products are panda friendly because we are not out there chopping down, you know, rainforests in, in, yeah.

Yeah, we are very careful of that. Maso bamboo is the name of the species of bamboo that we use. And this is not even the kind that pandas like to eat. It’s not their dinner. So and it’s all farmed. And for anybody interested in learning a little bit more about bamboo, bamboo is used all over the world for many, many reasons. It’s rebar. It’s so strong that they use it as rebar in a lot of countries when they’re doing construction on multiple level buildings. The bamboo shoots are eaten by people all over Asian countries, especially. Bamboo is used in hardwood flooring, cutting boards. And the reason it’s used in cutting boards is it’s a naturally antibacterial wood anyway.
So if you’re cutting raw meat on a cutting board, a bamboo one is an ideal one because it won’t carry and foster the same kind of bacteria that may be a plastic cutting board or another type of wood. So moving in the industry in general, textile, very much moving towards sustainability certifications for every aspect of production. So one of the things that we’re looking at is our cotton that’s blended in our bamboo fabric being BCI certified. Our factory does have BCI certified cotton, but it hasn’t been proven yet to be the type that will make our melange bedding line. So looking at that, really just trying to do the things in our industry in the e -comm space to grow more awareness and traffic to our BedVoyage website, as well as our Amazon store.

So,you know all the people that know about e -comm know about search engine optimization and all of that, and pay-per-click ads, and Google ads, and things like that. So we’re really going heavily into that space this year.

Bamboo is a wonderful product for sleeping for people that have allergies. So if someone has seasonal allergies or they have skin sensitivities, like I was mentioning eczema but psoriasis, if someone has diabetes and they have foot neuropathy and they just can’t stand the weight of heavy or scratchy sheets against their skin.

The bamboo is just this floaty, dreamy, wonderful fabric. It is amazing. It’s also an all -season fabric. So if you’re getting into bed in the winter and your sheets are cold, like cotton and you’re like burr or need to turn on the heating blanket, within less than 15 seconds getting into bed in the winter, bamboo sheets are warmed up. But they’re also not hot. So in the summer, just having a flat sheet over you is so amazing.

So I really want people to think about, you know, bamboo is not the only natural fabric, but moving away from bamboos and going, excuse me, cottons and going into like hemp and liacils and things that have benefits for you when you’re bathing, using towels that are odour resistant, mildew resistant, especially for people that have any kind of skin conditions.

So really just want to how people think more consciously about, I used to have this saying, go green in your bed, you know, cause everybody was go green, go green. And I’m like, go green in your bed. People don’t think about it. They don’t think about the mattress that they’re sleeping on. And if it’s off gassing, chemicals, you know, when it’s new, the pillow, the comforter, you think about the whole bedding oasis, you know, you really want it to be sustainable things if you want your best sleep. So I would leave it with that.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Stephen. Appreciate you as well. Thanks for having me on.