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With rest of day covered, performance makes its way to bed

You drive a performance car, while wearing a performance watch and sunglasses, and after jamming the brakes with a performance athletic shoe, your sweat is wicked away by the performance fabrics in your socks and shirt.

Everywhere, but especially at the intersection of sports and commerce, we’re living in a high-performance world.
You can now purchase everything from “performance eye drops” to “luxury performance underwear,” much of it aimed at athletes or athlete wannabes.

However, until recently we were unaware of the existence or need for performance sheets.

Sheets? Well, let’s start with the presumption that we spend one-third of our lives in bed. So bedding likely has a longer shelf life than most of the sneakers and T-shirts in your closet.

Former Champs Sports President and CEO Rubin Hanan watched the biggest athletic brands prosper during his 20 years in sports specialty retail and believes the biggest opportunity is between the sheets. Discovering an untapped niche in sports performance products these days is about as easy as finding a Sepp Blatter fan club.

Call it the Under Armour of bed linens. Hanan’s DermaTherapy Sport has launched a line of performance bedding, aimed at athletes and the “athletic leisure lifestyle” market.

“The biggest sports brands, Nike, Under Armour or whichever, focus on athletes from the time they get up to the time they go to sleep,” Hanan said from his office in Sarasota, Fla. “The most important part of recovery after athletic performance is sleep. All the other categories within sports have been exhausted. Sleep has not.”

On first take, bedding for athletes seems an unlikely business, but there are still those of us who can recall when there was no Gatorade, $40 T-shirts nor $100 sneakers on athletic fields.

Among DermaTherapy Sport’s line of products: pillowcases, travel sacks and sheet sets, all made from a nylon/polyester blend.
Priced at $200 to $250 for a set, these are not sheets from your mother’s linen closet. These are nylon/polyester blend, USA-made, moisture-wicking sheets with a litany of claims, ranging from the ability to eliminate night sweats to delivering a better quality night’s rest. They claim to allow a cleaner, dryer sleeping surface than cotton and “reduce the amount of work your body exerts while you sleep.”

Hmm, kinda reminds us of when Under Armour founder Kevin Plank used to refer to cotton as “the enemy.”

Sheex, a similar company founded by a pair of former University of South Carolina women’s basketball coaches in 2008, has distribution in Bed, Bath & Beyond and Amazon, but is less of a pure play, since it now markets boxers and lounge pants. While it surely has a better brand name, Hanan is relying on his products’ medical pedigree to make the difference.

DermaTherapy Sport sheets are anti-microbial, so they’d hopefully battle MRSA infections in locker rooms and bedbugs in hotels. A travel sack version ($99) originally attracted Hanan.

“I figured any mom paying thousands for her kid to be on travel teams would pay $99 to protect them from bedbugs — that’s what originally excited me from a business perspective,” he said.

The technology for the sheets was developed for medical use by Greensboro, N.C.-based Precision Fabrics Group, and the bedding has received Food and Drug Administration certification as a treatment for the most common form of eczema.

Around a quarter of all men suffer from some chronic sleep problem.

There’s one standard complaint sleep specialist Dr. Chris Winters hears from the athletes he counsels. “They all sleep hot,” said Winters, a Charlottesville, Va., neurologist, who has been involved with sleep medicine and research since 1993 and works with teams including the San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Rangers.

“These sheets were actually too cold for me, but for anyone with a temperature problem, they’ll work. … Everything else about [elite] athletes’ lives is micromanaged — nutrition, psychology, training, recovery, but they struggle just like everyone else when it comes to sleep.”

Winters, who has no financial connection to DermaTherapy Sport, added that now neither he nor his germophobic wife travel without bringing their travel sacks.

“It’s like a hotel condom,” he said.

Marathoner Charlie Engle brought the sheets to Hanan last year and after researching the category, he licensed the technology. Distribution is limited so far to the company’s website. But considering Hanan’s background, you have to believe there’s a sporting goods chain in his sights.

On the marketing side, Hanan says he’s working on team and athlete sponsorships. IMG Academy just started to use them for its athletes through one of DermaTherapy Sport’s first marketing deals.

Hanan’s convinced there’s a play for licensed collegiate sheets, partly based on the appeal for anything anti-microbial in a college dorm room.

Could this all portend a day when pro teams carry performance bedding with them on the road?

“Fifteen years ago, cotton T-shirts outnumbered performance tees at any gym 9-to-1 and that has turned around completely,” Hanan said. “I don’t know if we can get to 9-to-1 with athletic bedding, but I think we can get to 40 or 50 percent, and that’s a big business.”

We’ll wait to see how they, um, perform at retail.

Terry Lefton can be reached at tlefton@sportsbusinessjournal.com.

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