Our story

I was pregnant with my first daughter in 2002 when my pelvis started to give way. The condition has a name, pelvic girdle pain, and for me it was severe enough that turning over in bed became the hardest part of the day. I would wake up in the small hours needing to roll onto my other side and lie there working out how to do it. Sometimes I gave up and stayed where I was.

A midwife solved it with a piece of fabric. She put a slide sheet under me, the kind hospitals use to move patients, and I turned over as if I had never been pregnant at all. I remember lying there afterwards, wide awake and slightly annoyed that nobody had mentioned this to me months earlier.

The trick stayed with me through my second pregnancy, and by 2009 I was describing it to strangers on BabyCentre UK and Mumsnet, where thousands of women were asking the same question I had asked in 2002: how do you turn over in bed when your pelvis will not cooperate? Nobody there had a slide sheet at home, of course. That was the point. It was the moment the trick stopped being something I knew and became something I felt obliged to make.

A hospital slide sheet is a cold, slippery thing that belongs on a ward. What I wanted was a tube you could sleep on, soft against your skin, with the slippery layer hidden inside so your body glides the moment it wants to turn. We found a factory willing to make it properly, and in 2013 the Snoozle maternity slide sheet went on sale in the UK.

Then an email arrived from a woman going through cancer treatment. She wrote that the Snoozle was the only thing letting her turn over at night, and she wanted to know whether she was allowed to order one even though she was not expecting a baby. We took the word maternity out of the name that week. Pregnant women had been the beginning of the story, and it turned out the story was much bigger than that.

I have never really stopped being a customer. In 2011 I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of arthritis that settles in the spine, and I have slept on a Snoozle every night since. I made the thing I needed. A great many other people needed it too.

Around 2015 my friend Eva joined me and Snoozle became the two of us. Eva makes sure the sheets get made, shipped and delivered to the right doors, and she is the one the pharmacies and shops talk to. I look after the words, the website and the ideas that keep me up at night. She owns half the company and, on most days, rather more than half the common sense.

At home in Iceland, Eirberg, the country's leading supplier of health and wellbeing equipment, was our first big customer and is still one of our best. Today the Snoozle is sold in pharmacies across the country and in maternity shops, and the insurance company Vörður offers it to its customers. Around 40,000 Snoozles have been sold in a nation of just under 400,000 people, so roughly one Icelander in twenty-five has slept on one. We are quietly rather proud of that.

The Snoozle is a very simple answer to a very old problem. Turning over in bed should not hurt. If it does, we made something for you.

Lilja Þorsteinsdóttir
Founder, Snoozle