Back Story

Birth Of The Tailor Made Pillow

25 years ago I had a pretty bad neck injury from being young and careless in sport.

I recovered well but still struggled with a persistent yet simple problem… sleep! I just couldn’t nod off for more than an hour without waking in pain, each and every night.

I worked my way through 9 different support pillows without finding one that fit. Some came close but didn’t last long before they softened and lost their support.

Others never supported in the right areas, others were simply binned after a single night of frustration!

In the end, after alot of pain trying to sleep and alot of tired mornings I decided on more drastic action.

I took a blade and cut up a pillow in my garage. I gathered a load of foam and stuffed it along the edge of my pillow to fill it where my neck would need support.

With a bit of trial and error I found my ‘sweet spot’ where my neck and spine were supported perfectly, a straight spine and total relief as I slept. It took a while but i got there.

My first ‘tailor made’ pillow was born and it lasted a further 5 years. It wasn’t pretty but it did the job perfectly 🙂

The following few years in clinic, I was asked to do the same for my patients whom also struggled to get comfort sleeping.

In my clinic breaks, patients would pop in with their pillows. Id cut their pillows open and remove a bit of foam here, add a bit foam there and so on.

Big, small, short, tall, muscular everyone, 1000’s of patients over the years.

Population Differences

I’ve taken many many xrays of spines over the last 25 years. I’ve seen all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

One thing that is certain however is that we are all made very differently!

The text books tell us what is ‘normal’ but very few spines are in fact perfectly symmetrical, very few, if any, are text book.

Some spines naturally curve more, some less, some lean slightly to one side or the other. Its also true to say that as we age, the spine changes. Your neck at 18 is vastly different to when you reach 70.

This also means therefore that the degree of support a pillow should offer can change slowly as we age.

For example, for someone who is 68 years old, wear and tear to a spine over 50 years can sometimes cause the head to slowly push forward, sometimes called ‘anterior head carriage’ or ‘forward head posture’.

This means forcing the spine into the ‘text book position’ is fruitless… the spine has literally changed!

I realised early on that a pillow must support your’ spine not the average.

A pillow must support the spine to accommodate how it was made, how it ages, and most importantly how it is now… based solely on your specific dimensions, not the drawings in your text books.

Pillow Algorhym

The vast amount of data I’d now gathered was squeezed into a simple bit of software we called the ‘Pillow Algorithm’.

This algorithm could now tell us within less than 10 seconds what the shape and dimensions of anyone’s perfect pillow would look like.

In other words, everyone has their very own sweet spot of perfect support when sleeping. But now our algorithm could find it and, more importantly, help us make a pillow to support you in the sweet spot as you sleep.

25 years after the birth of our first tailor made pillow, Pillow Doctor has grown and grown, helping people around the world get the perfect nights sleep 🙂