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Meet Jonathan and Evita Kunke of Honeydew Sleep

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan and Evita Kunke.

Jonathan and Evita, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Jonathan: I grew up in the mattress industry. When I was four years old, my father Fred (then a manufacturer’s representative for a major mattress brand) opened a brick and mortar mattress store, that soon turned into multiple stores. As a child, I would hang out at the stores, emulating my father, and absorbing the knowledge and expertise that he had spent decades building. I loved helping out however I could, giving away free hot dogs to customers on holiday weekends, and then later during my high school years, riding along in the delivery trucks and helping out in the office.

After graduating from college, I began working alongside my dad full time, and have been now for almost 15 years. Just by virtue of spending so much time in that environment, I learned a lot about sleep and how important it is to your overall health and wellness from a very young age. Most importantly, I learned that the majority of people aren’t getting enough of it, and in many cases, they don’t even know why that is. It became my mission to help improve people’s sleep, and in doing so, their quality of life.

Evita: I have always been quite a wanderer. Family, friends and community have always been the loves of my life. In school, I developed a deep love of acting and followed that dream by earning my bachelor’s degree from Cal Lutheran University in Theater and moving to Los Angeles as an aspiring actress. I threw myself into every class I could find, worked some very odd jobs to make ends meet, and went to every audition that would have me. I spent four years like this, running around, trying to wedge my foot in the door, and chasing that joy that I found being in the spotlight and on the stage. But as is often the outcome of such stories, I just couldn’t make it work for me. However, although at the time it felt like these were some of my more difficult moments, I wouldn’t say I failed. I learned so much about who I was and what I actually needed in order to have joy and fulfillment in my life. For instance, acting is a profession where you have to really focus on yourself, and work to promote yourself in every possible way, but I found that I was always far happier when my focus was on other people so I moved back home for a fresh start.

Jonathan: I was feeling very happy and fulfilled working in the sleep industry and running our family business with my father. I wasn’t particularly looking for anything else, but nearly ten years after having a high school crush on Evita, she moved back to our hometown and we were reunited, and as fate would have it our youthful flirtations turned into a real kind of love. Two years into this new love story I proposed, and I must be a lucky man because she said yes.

Evita: Moving home, falling in love with Jonathan, and getting married was my biggest dream come true. Our wedding was storybook worthy, and our marriage has been divine. Yes, we are that sappy, annoying couple who seems to be falling more and more in love every day. We share a mutual passion for creative arts, and we both love working on a variety of creative projects together. I enjoy event planning, interior design and photography, and Jonathan is a musician and craftsman. We have worked together seamlessly on a myriad of projects together, building all kinds of things, from guitars for Jonathan to wishing wells and hot air balloons for special events that I would coordinate. Working together has always made our bond stronger and so at some point, I was naturally drawn into Jonathan’s family business.

It all made perfect sense because having had some severe back issues when I was younger, I had experienced first hand what a difference the right mattress could make. I certainly had a deep appreciation for the power of this industry and my new career gave me a way to pursue my passion of helping others. Our combined experience and our creative nature our led us into a different path than we could have expected: manufacturing. Struck by the complete lack of pillows on the market that were actually designed to both assist with alignment and still feel comfortable, Honeydew Sleep was born.

Jonathan: We saw in our stores that people seemed to be underestimating the power of their pillow. We kept hearing over and over that people had accumulated piles of pillows at home and weren’t happy with any of them, which was something that we could personally relate to. People would light up in our stores when they found their perfect mattress but when it came to the pillow, we mostly saw frowns, accompanied by groaning and vehement avoidance. We knew, due to our extensive experience that the pillow was not something that could be dismissed or ignored. Something was missing, so in 2014 we set out on an unexpectedly arduous journey to create the perfect pillow. We pooled all of our knowledge and passion into developing new and improved products that could bridge the gaps of our customer’s needs. We learned to sew, we flew all over trying to find the perfect fabric and materials. Once we felt we had developed the perfect pillow, we brought them into our mattress stores, and we knew right away that we were on to something.

Evita: All of a sudden we saw people lighting up and gushing about the pillow, not just the beds in our stores! It was incredibly rewarding. We were making them in small batches for our stores, and as word of mouth grew, we started to see more and more people coming into our stores just to try our pillows.

Jonathan: One morning I was alone in our mattress store and Charlie Sheen walked in and asked, “Do you guys have those Scrumptious Pillows?” I could not believe that something we had started making on a dining room table was beginning to get that type of attention, without us ever doing any advertising at all. It really validated the idea that we were building something special.

Evita: We started selling our pillows online and we begun to get customers emailing us telling us that our pillows had changed their life. All of those responses, the emails, the phone calls, and the smiling faces we saw in person, all of the rave reviews we were getting brought tears of joy to our eyes. We knew that we had to do whatever we could to grow our business and get our pillows into more hands because we could see that we were really making a difference in people’s lives.

Jonathan: That was the start of Honeydew Sleep!

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Evita: As with any new venture, there always unforeseen challenges. There is so much more to making pillows than we initially imagined. When we first started, we were making all of our pillows by hand, one by one, for really just our family members and friends. My mom was sewing pillow covers on her little sewing machine on her dining table, and we were mixing our fill by hand, and elbow-deep in carefully stuffing them ourselves. After the rave reviews from our loved ones and our own love for our products, we decided to think just a little bit bigger, offering our pillows in extremely small batches to our brick and mortar customers.

As our little batches began flying off our shelves, and word of mouth brought us more and more requests and preorders, we realized we needed to streamline our manufacturing process a bit to make things more efficient. We needed a way to meet the sudden demand without compromising quality. We had this idea (which we thought was brilliant at the time) to create a mixer that would allow us to combine our fill materials in a larger quantity than the buckets we were currently using (which would only allow us to make one pillow’s worth of material at a time). So we bought the biggest Shop Vac that they make, and we were super excited about using it to combine the materials.

We were planning on putting the fill materials inside it, then turning it on and letting the air pressure move the material around, which sounds good on paper, right? Well, that’s what we thought. Turns out we were way off. The Shop-Vac began spewing our pillow fill all over the place, and it began to snow little tufts of fill all over the entire room. “Abort! Abort!” we yelled, but it was too late. The fiber was stuck in our hair like we had been standing in the middle of a snowstorm. These white puffs clung to our hair, our eyelashes, and our clothes, not to mention every single object in the room. We were silent for a moment as we assessed the mess that our “blizzard” had made. And then we all erupted in laughter, tears in our eyes, giggling wildly. It was all fun and games until we realized we had to spend hours cleaning up the mess we had made.

Jonathan: To be honest, to this day we sometimes find a stray piece of foam still clinging to the back of a sofa, or partially tucked into the rug.

Evita: We call them “little gifts” because they always make us smile at the memory of our snow day.

Jonathan: This was a big moment for us because it really forced us to take a hard look at where we were and decide where we wanted to go with Honeydew. We were at that crossroads that every entrepreneur comes to where they have to decide if they are going to take the plunge and go all-in on their idea, which is a scary decision to be faced with. If you do decide to move forward, it means you can fail, and that is terrifying. But we knew in our hearts that we had something special on our hands and that we needed to share it with the world.

Evita: I’m a quite the professional worrier, so this type of risk, this leap of faith, took every bit of courage I could muster up. But, for the first time in my life, I felt like I just knew I had to do this – there was no other option. My passion overcame my fear. In a strange way, it felt like it would be irresponsible to give up, knowing what a difference our pillows were making for people. So I guess what we learned from that is that half measures weren’t going to work. We needed to dive in headfirst, and of course, it was the best thing we ever did!

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Honeydew Sleep – what should we know?
Jonathan: We like to say that at Honeydew Sleep, we love people, we believe in the power of sleep, and we know we can make a difference, one dream at a time. We make pillows designed to improve your sleep by addressing some of the areas where other pillows fall short.

Evita: Our pillows are all individually handmade, by us, right here in Southern California. We personally hold each product in our hands before sending it out, and we are the ultimate perfectionists (some would say control freaks). Every material that we use and every product that we create is wholly unique and unparalleled in quality. For example, to find the perfect fill we tested countless materials in varying ratios made by all of the top professionals in the pillow industry. Ultimately, every single one fell short of our standards. So we ordered specialized machinery that would allow us to make our own fill in house, and the difference is night and day. We have the only pillows that actually feel luxurious and soft, but at the same time offer unwavering structure and support.

Jonathan: Our background in sleep health really sets us apart as well. Every pillow that we make is designed for a specific purpose, or for someone who sleeps primarily in a certain position. The typical rectangle that we have landed on as our societal default really doesn’t cut it for a side sleeper, for example. So we make two different pillows for people who sleep primarily on their side.

Evita: Our travel pillow is another great example – it is so large that many of our customers tell us that they use it as their primary pillow – and that is exactly the point. Why would you go to the trouble of bringing a pillow along with you while traveling if you are only going to use it on your flight? That didn’t make sense to us. We love to travel, so we wanted a pillow that could travel with us and provide us the comfort of home no matter where we were laying our heads. We wanted to wake up rested and feeling great whether we were traveling for business or pleasure. We hated getting stuck with the sad and overused hotel pillows.

We wanted a pillow that would give you the support that you need both while on the plane as well as in your hotel room, and it is a revelation. Being able to sleep well and not waking up with a sore neck makes your trip so much more enjoyable, and even reduces jet lag significantly because you are able to reset your circadian rhythms much more quickly.

Jonathan: The thing that we are most proud of is that we have so many customers reach out to us telling us that our pillows have changed their lives. We have had customers bring their Honeydew pillows to their chiropractors, only to have their chiropractors start recommending them to their patients. We always say that we would never make something that we wouldn’t want to use personally, and the fact that that philosophy has resonated with so many people really drives us to be continually improving, and always trying to be the very best that we can be.

Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Jonathan: My father of course, deserves so much credit. He is the one who introduced us to the world of sleep, and he is an integral part of Honeydew. He is there working alongside us every day. When I am making pillows, he is the one who is massaging them to get the fill distributed perfectly, and the one who is sealing them up while I fill them. We couldn’t do this without him and are so grateful to have him there to keep us going. Not to mention, he is always willing to humor us and is always encouraging Evita and me to see our ideas through, no matter how ambitious or crazy they may seem in the beginning.

Evita: My mother, too, has been immensely supportive since day one. When we first decided to do this, none of us knew how to sew, and so it was my mom who was making all of our pillow covers by hand on her dining room table. She is also a good sport, and no matter what we ask her to do, she is always willing to give it a shot, even if she thinks it is a bit crazy. She is also a perfectionist, so her pillow covers are always incredible, and she inspires us to always make sure that everything we send out is nothing short of perfect.

Jonathan: The other important member of our team is Evita’s cousin Alex. He is the one who designed our website, and made our logo come to life from Evita’s napkin drawing of a melon cut in half with the word Honeydew over it. He is also there helping us take photos of our products alongside Evita, and has even modeled our pillow! You can find him in a couple of pictures on our website.

Evita: Yes, all of our models on the website are our close friends and family. We are a small company, so rather than hiring photographers and models, we do everything ourselves. That’s why on our website you see us on our pillows, or Alex, or my sister. Our very first photos featured my goddaughter and some of our closest friends, and we are always so grateful to those willing to come spend a day with us modeling our products.

Pricing:

  • The Scrumptious Side Sleeper Pillow is our flagship pillow, and it runs $99
  • The Essence Side Sleeper Pillow is a more budget-friendly option of our best selling Side Sleeper shape, and it is $79
  • Body by Honeydew is our Body Pillow, and it comes with a pillow case and costs $149
  • The Scrumptious Travel Pillow is $99, and comes with a pillow case and a carrying bag
  • The Classic Scrumptious Pillow is a more traditional, rectangular pillow, and it costs $99
  • The Scrumptious Pillow Case comes in multiple sizes to fit our various pillows, and they run $29 for the classic and side sleeper, $24 for the Travel Size, and $39 for the Body Pillow

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