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Keep Your Cool!
Special Pajamas to Get You Through "Hot Flash" Nights By Kelly Burgess
We all know the routine: Wake up soaked, change your shirt or jammies, change your sheets, wish you had an unlimited supply of dry pillows, try to get back to sleep, wake up tired and repeat. That's what Wendy McClung had been doing for a while until, one night, she happened to put on a shirt that didn't get soaked when she hot flashed. She realized the next morning after a rare, comfortable, full night's sleep that it was one of her jogging shirts, specially formulated to wick away moisture.
Then McClung had another hot flash of the commercial type. "I figured if this concept of wicking away sweat [can] work for athletes, it can work for women who are waking up wet with sweat," says McClung. The next morning I went to my neighbor who's a designer and asked if she thought it was a good idea. She did, and we hit the ground running."
McClung and her neighbor, now partner, Jutta Smardenka, started the company HotCoolWear featuring the Hot Mama line of sleepwear in their native Canada and quickly expanded into the United States.
Wicking fabrics, on the other hand, work to quickly move the moisture to the surface of the clothing where it rapidly evaporates. Besides keeping the moisture from the skin, this can save sheets, pillows and pillowcases from becoming soaked.
But while this fabric already existed for athletes, the big challenge was to use the same technology and make it work with sleepwear, which needs to be soft and attractive two attributes that are not generally associated with jogging clothes.