I'm the Customer I Built This For

This is the piece I wish someone had handed me five years ago. Instead of finding it, I had to live it. And then build the answer.

I Have Never Been Great At Sleep

That's the first thing you should know about me. Long before perimenopause, long before I understood anything about hormones or textile science or sleep architecture, I was someone who just didn’t ever feel like I got a good night’s sleep.  Overnight recovery was just not a thing I understood.

I felt the hours accumulate in the dark. I ran on coffee and willpower and the particular kind of exhausted determination that women in demanding careers know very well.

I spent twenty years simultaneously as a professional recording artist and executive — building things, leading teams, performing on stages, raising a family. Sleep was always what happened between the things that mattered, not a thing that mattered in itself.

I thought that was just who I was. A light sleeper. A driven person who didn't need much. A woman who had learned to function on less.

I was wrong about all of it. But it took my body staging what I can only describe as a full rebellion for me to understand that.

When Perimenopause Changed Everything

It didn't announce itself. It never does.

It started with what I thought was anxiety — a racing heart in the middle of the night, a sudden heat that came from nowhere, a restlessness I couldn't explain. I was in my early-forties. I was healthy. I was strong. I had managed my nervous system through voice training and performance and decades of high-stakes work.

And yet I could not sleep through the night. Not once. Not reliably.

I would wake at 3am — drenched, heart pounding, skin feeling like it was on fire from the inside. I would lie there for an hour, two hours, watching the ceiling, calculating how many hours of sleep I had left if I fell back asleep right now. Doing the math. Knowing the math was making it worse.

I was exhausted in a way I had never been before — a cellular, bone-deep exhaustion that didn't resolve with rest because the rest was no longer restorative. My cognition suffered. My emotional regulation frayed in ways that alarmed me. I felt, for the first time in my adult life, genuinely out of control of my own body.

I had spent my whole life learning how to regulate my nervous system through my voice. Perimenopause overrode all of it.

I Tried Everything

I say that without exaggeration. I tried the bamboo pajamas. I tried the cooling sheets, the weighted blanket, the sleep tracking app, the specific pillow, the room at 68 degrees. I tried magnesium glycinate and ashwagandha and tart cherry extract. I had conversations with my doctor, adjusted my HRT dosage, added progesterone.

Things got a little better. But I was still waking up. Still not reaching the deep sleep that recovery actually requires. Still waking up exhausted from a night that, on paper, should have been sufficient.

At some point I stopped trying to fix the symptoms and started asking a different question: why? Why was the system failing? What was actually happening in my body during the hours I was supposed to be recovering? And why was nothing I could find in the market actually built for this?

The Discovery That Changed Everything

I had spent years designing and constructing garments — it's a lifelong practice that goes back to my earliest days in performance. I understood fabric from a maker's perspective: drape, hand, structure, movement. But I had never gone deep into textile science from a physiological perspective.

When I did, the gap I found was staggering.

The research on sleep and skin microclimate is clear: the layer in direct contact with your body during sleep has a measurable, significant impact on sleep quality. The thermal and moisture environment right at the surface of your skin — that narrow interface between your body and your fabric — directly affects whether your brain stays in sleep or pulls you out.

For women in perimenopause and menopause, whose hypothalamic thermostat is dysregulated by declining estrogen, this interface is everything. Every thermal spike that crosses the wake-up threshold pulls you out of the sleep your body desperately needs to repair itself.

And the sleepwear market? It was selling cooling. Passive, reactive, surface-level cooling. Bamboo that wicks moisture after you've already sweated. Cotton that breathes but saturates. Polyester blends marketed with words like "temperature-regulating" that had no mechanism behind them.

Nobody was addressing the layer closest to the body with the seriousness it deserved.

I had the textile research in that I had launched Yomisma as an eco-friendly, ethical brand in 2023. I had the supply chain relationships. I had the founder experience. I had the clinical advisors. And I had years of being the exact customer I was building for. I felt the dire need to solve this problem.

The market had cooling. My body needed recovery. Those are not the same thing.

Why No Microplastics

The deeper I went into textile science, the more alarmed I became about what most of us are sleeping in.

The majority of sleepwear — including most of the products marketed as cooling or luxury or even "natural" — contains synthetic fibers. Polyester. Nylon. Spandex blends. These are petroleum-derived plastics. And when you wear them against your skin for eight hours every night, you are in sustained, intimate contact with materials that shed microplastic particles, that don't breathe the way natural or bioactive fibers do, and that some research links to endocrine-disrupting compounds.

For women whose hormonal systems are already in transition, the idea of wrapping their bodies in plastic every night struck me as not just counterproductive but unconscionable.

So I made a commitment: no microplastics. No synthetic fibers. Every component of TriVara is biodegradable. Every fiber does something real for your body. We will not compromise on this, ever.

Why Menopause Became the Focus

People sometimes ask me why I didn't build a broader sleep brand. Why perimenopause and menopause specifically?

The honest answer is that I built for the woman I was and I am.  The woman who was suffering in the dark at 3am, who had done everything right, who was managing a demanding life with grace and competence and running on empty underneath it all.

I built it for my friends, my colleagues and the rest of the women in the world who are tired of being dismissed. 

Fifty million women in the United States are in perimenopause or menopause right now. Seventy-five percent of them experience vasomotor symptoms. Forty to sixty percent report serious sleep disruption. The market they've been handed — cooling fabrics and bamboo pajamas and supplements that address hormones but not the contact layer — has not served them.

This is the most underserved, highest-need, highest-spending consumer cohort in wellness. And nobody had built what they actually needed.

It took two years. It took every resource I had. It required developing a proprietary three-fiber system — TriVara — combining phase-change thermal regulation, bioceramic far-infrared inflammation support, and collagen-derived skin recovery, permanently engineered into every yarn so it never washes out.

But I would do every minute of it again.

What I Want for You

If you're reading this and you recognize yourself in the 3am wake-ups, in the exhaustion that doesn't resolve, in the feeling that your body is doing something you weren't prepared for and the market hasn't caught up to — I see you.

You are not broken. You are not weak. You are a woman in a physiological transition that the wellness industry has underfunded, underresearched, and underaddressed for far too long. 

Your sleep matters. Your recovery matters. The layer that's touching your body for eight hours every night matters.

Yomisma exists because I couldn't find what I needed, so I built it. And I built it for you.

Our founding collection launches in November 2026. The waitlist is open now. Join us at yomismaclothing.com — and be among the first women to sleep in a garment that was built, from the fiber up, for exactly what your body is doing. Wellness You Can Wear™.