This Canadian entrepreneur is putting an end to night sweats, one set of bed sheets and pair of pjs at a time

For many women older than 45, winter doesn’t bring relief from hot flashes or night sweats. can make sleeping with the windows open in mid January still feel like one of Toronto’s blazing July summer nights. Anywhere from 75 to 80 per cent of people going through menopause experience night sweats of some kind, sometimes lasting for more than a decade.

Night sweats also don’t spare many breast or ovarian , Lupus patients, or anyone who sleeps with a duvet loving partner. So Lusomé, a Calgary based sleepwear brand selling across Canada, decided to put together pyjamas and bedsheets it claims can stop the waterworks in their tracks. Lara Smith, Lusomé’s founder, spent years at the top of Canadian retailer Mark's Work Warehouse before starting her own company.

During that time, she was dispatched to Southeast Asia, South America and Europe to hunt down the most innovating textile facilities and testing labs around. Eventually, she figured out a formula capable of addressing night sweats, as well as daytime temperature regulation. Lusomé isn’t cheap, nor does it act as an ice pack on an overheating person’s body.

But as Smith says, its fabric does try and give everyone a decent night’s sleep. She spoke to the Star from Calgary: The pyjamas can’t actually stop a mechanism inside anyone’s body from overheating. But as soon as moisture vapour or any sweat starts to come onto the surface of the body, the technology of the fabric — at the fibre level — will pull it away through the surface chemistry of the fabric and emit it into the air.

It happens through rapid evaporation. Compared to athletic brands, a lot of them use wicking polyester, and a lot of brands make claims of moisture wicking. Sweat doesn’t stay in our fabric because of the surface chemistry. When you start to sweat into fabrics with wicking, it’ll absorb the moisture, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

We’re really wicking 2.0. Most of our work was done on menopausal women who experience excessive night sweats. Getting rid of the need to wake up to soaking wet pyjamas and change your sheets alleviates a lot of discomfort. We’re not saying that we will cool the body down, or stop the body from overheating, with our pyjama fabric.

Now, the bedsheet fabric is very different technology. It absorbs heat energy before you start to sweat. It’s a much more sophisticated technology — it’s really the ultimate cooling system. Effectively, it eliminates sweating before it even starts. It’s a complicated answer, and it’s kind of rooted in the psychology of what a woman deals with in .

Imagine you’re aging. You’re not feeling great. You can’t carry a child inside your body and give birth any longer. There’s also the stigma of aging. It is not a sexy conversation. So I think it’s all wrapped up in that. Some celebrities have started making some noise. When started talking about it, when Naomi Watts founded a company devoted to menopausal skin care, it opened up enough for the masses to talk about it.

There are a lot of bandwagon jumpers in the past two years that are creating supplement companies or apps. It’s a $60 billion market, and five per cent of overall marketing spending is aimed at menopausal women. Radiation treatment changes the overall physiology of cancer survivors. For ovarian or breast cancer, the treatment protocol essentially puts them into 10 years of menopausal symptoms — which are hormone changes and night sweats.

I didn’t do any of my work on Lusomé until I learned about my sister’s suffering. She was 39 and going through chemotherapy, radiation and then hormone protocols. She had excessive night sweats. I just thought that was criminal — that people trying to survive couldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

There are thousands of new cancer patients daily. Their body chemistry changes, and they will overheat at night as a result. So it’s very, very helpful for them to have a solution. We are really delayed in putting out a product for men — because men also suffer from night sweats. Any hormone related disease or condition, from hyperthyroidism to Lupus, can cause it.

Night sweats can even be a symptom that you’re fighting serious illness. Depression medication and surgical recovery can also cause night sweats. So there’s a plethora of conditions it can bring about. There’s great skepticism that a textile could work, and for good reason. There are so many brands using science theatre to make claims that can’t be substantiated.

Our approach is to partner with academic institutions to put forth research that compares our data to competitors. Very few brands go through this time and expense. But we can say we’ve been verified by scientists at the University of Alberta. We are starting a clinical trial with Harvard University in the U.S.

to evaluate the body temperature and health indicators of users when they sleep on our sheets. We just want to protect the consumer. For instance, there are so many brands that use bamboo that say it uses natural cooling mechanisms. There’s some breathability in the fibre, there are some moisture wicking properties, but sweat still gets trapped in it.

So they can’t claim it actually cools people down. It’s irresponsible. If a company has a lot of money and time and patience, they could get close to reverse engineering our fabric, which is why we are always iterating. We have one of the world’s leaders in textile on our board, Harrie Schoots.

He’s the past president of . He’s a genius when it comes to fabric development and innovation. So he is always getting his fabric mill to work on projects for us that they can’t show anyone else. We’re really staying ahead of the curve thanks to our adviser that has such a gravitas in the textile industry, as well as my relationships with fabric mills.

Our business went through the roof. Our direct to consumer sales exploded during the pandemic. There were big opportunities in the U.S. Major retailers came calling. My partner attempted a hostile takeover at that time. But our sales quadrupled. As much as people were into pyjamas, women were also connecting lack of sleep to immunity.

We’re a health tech brand, so we have an extra layer. If you’re not sleeping and worried about sweating during the night, our pyjamas will help your health. Oh, it was horrible. I’m still in shock. Listen, I’m a woman who shakes hands and looks people in the eye. Previously, I never looked at the small print on every document.

I will never be in that position again. I have lawyers and agreements now, and I’m really well versed on the risks. In fact, this turned out to be the best thing that could happen to our company because it really forced us to transform. Previously, we were a single category niche women’s pyjama brand that only sold to mom and pop independent stores, because that was the model of my former partner.

I always wanted to innovate. I wanted to do big U.S. deals. And I wanted to get new fabrics market to help women. But the agreement with my business partner didn’t allow me to do that. So, it took off the handcuffs..