SNOOZ is an elegant and discrete white noise machine designed around an ultra-compact patented fan that turns any bedroom into a haven for sleep. Whether you are an adult that has trouble with falling asleep or a restless baby, SNOOZ prepares your space for a restful night of sleep with the soothing sound of moving air.

A large percentage of Americans already sleep with a fan facing the wall to avoid the moving air, but this is a very inefficient practice and an irresponsible use of electricity. Some use digital noise machines, but typically they're built with low-quality speakers that sound fake and don't have the wide frequency range and low-end resonance where the most soothing tones are found. These sound machines are often used in nurseries to ease the baby into sleep, but many times they can be too loud for delicate ears and run throughout the night.

With SNOOZ, we met the challenge of creating a beautiful device that blankets a space in the natural sound of moving air without the breeze while using 98% less energy than the typical box fan. And with a first-ever nursery calibration feature, parents can rest easy knowing the sound level is safe for their little one's ears.

Using the Snooz name as a jumping off point, a new logo and brand standards were created to complement the product. The logo uses the moon as an icon of sleep. Brand imagery is a combination of lifestyle room imagery, sleep imagery and the ethereal northern lights images. Layering the three creates a sense of a sleepy, safe, dream landscape that thematically ties to the logo design.

Introduction

SNOOZ provides peaceful white noise from a real fan, not a digital sample, in an ultra-compact package so you can fall asleep and stay asleep. On the outside, SNOOZ is a beautifully designed object that complements any interior or bedroom. On the inside, it's a perfectly engineered tool for sleep that leverages an aerospace blade design and a high-end motor from Mabuchi, a Japanese manufacturer recognized for producing the world's best electric motors. This combination makes SNOOZ a unique offering as it balances high design with uncompromised performance.

The State of Sleep

One reason white noise is so effective for sleep is because it reduces the delta between the baseline sound and contaminating noise, so as a room gets quieter and hearing becomes more acute, many disturbances aren't heard, and the effects of the remaining are lessened. SNOOZ uniquely uses a real mechanical fan born of aerospace engineering to generate natural white noise in a specific range of harmonics instead of relying on artificial digital sound and does so without blowing air on you or throughout your room.

Product Design

Existing sleep products look like medical instruments or complicated tech devices, but we wanted SNOOZ to feel at home in your home. We introduced a new premium aesthetic that compliments the modern home interior to this market for the first time. SNOOZ's soft fabric shell and spherical shape brings warmth and texture to the device while remaining subtle and intuitive. This shell architecture also allows for modularity in manufacturing and easy user customization. The premium 3D knit fabric sleeve doesn't just conceal the fan and venting within, but acts as a floating surface that rotates around the core, allowing for tone adjustment with a simple turn. All this in a lightweight, compact design that makes SNOOZ ultra-portable during travel to remedy sleepless nights in restless hotel rooms.

Users can optionally use the SNOOZ app on their smartphone for additional features like automatic timers, adjusting the volume, and calibrating SNOOZ for a nursery environment.

User Experience

At its core, SNOOZ is a simple analog device that delivers the promise of sound sleep without the need of a smartphone, but for a more personalized experienced, the free SNOOZ companion app offers deeper functionality.

Connected Companion: Users can control their SNOOZ from their smartphone to adjust a number of settings including volume, automatic timers, and nursery calibration.

Travel Friendly: Hotels may always seem to have the best mattresses, but that's only one factor in getting a restful night's sleep. At just 3" tall, SNOOZ is lightweight, discreet, and travel friendly for wherever you choose to lay your head at night.

Adjustable Tone: Do you prefer a light sound like a table fan, a deep drone like an airplane cabin, or somewhere in-between? Simply rotate the base to find the tone that works best for you.

Mask Disturbances: Plenty of new devices are designed to track sleep disturbances, but only SNOOZ sets out to end them. Fall asleep to the naturally soothing sound of moving air, not artificial tracks looping through cheap speakers.

Protect Baby's Ears: Use the SNOOZ app's nursery calibration to ensure the sound level is safe for your little one's delicate ears.

Stay Warm: SNOOZ uses a real mechanical fan to create a cocoon of sound without blowing cold air throughout your room, so you can lose the extra blanket.

Save Money: Our ultra-efficient brushless Japanese motor uses 98% less energy than the typical box fan.

Stakeholders & Manufacturing

SNOOZ had run a successful crowdfunding campaign with a first gen design but after the company had finished its fundraising it turned out the design was not easy to manufacture, and it functionally did not work. SNOOZ approached us desperate to solve their functional dilemma. We redesigned the core product to solve all original issues, and developed a holistic brand and product design that reflected the start-up's values and goals. The introduction of the fabric knit wrap allowed us to solve both the functional airflow and noise generation requirement while creating a design that was much more suitable and appropriate for the bedroom and home. The design also stands out among the competition in a highly emotional category that to date has been engineered to look purely utilitarian and uninspiring.

Brand Design

To create the visual identity for a brand centered around sound, we set out to find a way to visualize peaceful white noise. In creating the logo, we used known elements that evoke sleep. The moon is an iconic symbol for bedtime, so we worked with the double OO's in SNOOZ as planets to build a crescent moon into the brand name. We were inspired by the ethereal quality of the northern lights to visually show the impact white noise can have on your sleep environment. The combination of the Brand iconography was created to further communicate at-a-glance benefits of the device.

Brand imagery is a combination of lifestyle room imagery, sleep imagery and the ethereal northern lights images. Layering the three creates a sense of a sleepy, safe, dream landscape that thematically ties to the logo design.

Customers

SNOOZ looks natural in its setting and we have seen outstanding feedback from customers who claim they "can't live without it." Its average rating on Amazon is 4.7 stars which is the highest in the category.