I couldn't sleep more.

Two kids under three. They don't sleep through the night, so neither do I. My workday starts at 7am whether the night went well or not.

For about a year I tried to fix the wrong thing. Earlier bedtime. Naps when I could get them. The sleep books — all of them written for someone with eight uninterrupted hours to optimise. None of them had a chapter for a night that gets cut in half at 3am.

You can't negotiate with a two-year-old at 3am.
Those hours weren't coming back.

So I stopped counting hours

I'd been wearing an Oura ring for a while, mostly out of curiosity. My recovery score sat around 71. Not bad. Not great either.

Then I came across nasal breathing, and realised something I had never once thought about: I was spending my nights with my mouth open and had no idea. Dry mouth every morning. Restless. Flat after what looked, on paper, like a decent night.

So I taped my mouth shut. It felt ridiculous.

Then the tape became the problem

I tried what was out there. Most of it felt like it had been built by people who had never been woken up at 3am.

Aggressive adhesive that left a red outline on my face in the morning. Plastic film that tugged every time I moved and had peeled off by 2am. Tape so industrial-looking I didn't want it near my face. And almost all of it designed, sold and photographed for men — as if broken nights were a gender.

Nothing I tried was made for a night that gets interrupted. Which is the only kind of night I have.

A year later

That's how long it took, from the idea to something I was willing to put my name on.

The biggest decision was the material. I kept coming back to a soft non-woven fabric for one reason: it was the most comfortable thing I found against the mouth. It feels like fabric because it is fabric — not plastic, not medical tape. The adhesive holds through the night and lifts off in one motion, without pulling at skin or stubble.

Three layers, and nothing else. No vent, no gimmick, no fragrance, no printing on the strip. Every extra thing is one more thing to irritate your face at 3am.

I made it beige and quiet on purpose. It shouldn't look like equipment, and it shouldn't look like a medical device. It should look like something you'd leave on your bedside table without hiding it.

Where the name comes from

I've spent years reading about longevity — the long, unglamorous version of it, the kind built out of ordinary days rather than breakthroughs. Lyvn comes from that. Living, stretched out.

Sleep turned out to be the part I was getting most wrong, and the part I could change fastest.

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What we're not promising

We won't give you more sleep. Nothing can — not this, not a mattress, not an app. Your kids will still wake up. Your alarm will still go off.

What changes is what happens inside the hours you do get.

That's the whole idea, and it's the only one we'll make.

— Jonathan, founder of Lyvn