Project
Eight Sleep
POD 5
Launch
Eight Sleep had built the most ambitious version of its sleep system to date: Pod 5 Ultra, extended by a Thermal Blanket and a Pod Pillow Cover, all run by an AI layer called Autopilot.
Beyond its role as an industrial design partner on Eight Sleep’s new developments, n-others was entrusted with translating that system’s features into animation — chosen for its expertise in showing products and usability with graphic excellence.
The brief: a launch video and a full onboarding series that could make a genuinely complex product feel effortless from the moment someone opened the box.
The launch video has since passed 70 million views on YouTube.
- Year2025
- ClientEight Sleep
- PlaceNew York
The Challenge
Pod 5 Ultra was an ecosystem, not a single product: the Pod, a Thermal Blanket, and a Pod Pillow Cover, coordinated by an AI layer (Autopilot) that adjusts temperature, elevation, and sound through the night. Customers could buy the Pod alone or in up to eight combinations with the Blanket, Pillow, and an adjustable Base, each with its own setup flow.
That created a real risk. A system this capable could easily become a feature dump: screen after screen of specs, with no reason to care. Eight Sleep needed a launch video that sold the feeling in under two minutes, and an onboarding series that taught it without feeling like a manual.
The brief also had a technical constraint. Everything had to work across combinations not yet shipped when the script locked, and flex enough to reorder or drop chapters (Cover, Blanket, Base) depending on what a customer bought.
From Script to Screen
Once the script was locked, production moved in three stages:
- Pre-production: moodboards and storyboards, pixel-perfect 3D modeling of every product, animatics, and style frames — the stage where lighting, color, and pacing got approved before a single final frame was rendered.
- Production: scene modeling, shading and texturing, animation and rendering across two full rendering passes.
- Post-production: compositing, color correction, motion graphics, and edit.
The process ran as a tight, visible loop with Eight Sleep rather than a black box — moodboards, storyboards, copy, and style frames lived on a shared board where the client could comment directly on individual frames (a warmer grey for the background, an approved reference for a bedside scene) instead of waiting for the next full cut to react.
That real-time back-and-forth is what let a project this technically dense — dozens of screens, eight product combinations, three synced video formats — move through pre-production without losing time to guesswork.
Launch Animation & Onboarding Assets
The relationship produced two connected pieces of work. The POD 5 Launch Video ( landscape, up to two minute) became Eight Sleep's core explainer, running across the website, social, paid media, and CX channels.
Alongside it, a full Test Drive onboarding series walked customers through setup in portrait format, built for the app (9:16) and iPad (4:3): a standalone Pillow Test Drive, and a Pod 5 Test Drive split into Cover, Blanket, and Base chapters that could be shown or skipped depending on what a customer actually owned.
Together, the three pieces cover the full customer journey: the Launch Video sells the system in under two minutes; the Test Drives walk each customer through calibration, temperature, Autopilot, elevation, and audio, one flexible chapter at a time.
IMPACT
The POD 5 Launch Video has passed 70 million views on YouTube and continues to run as Eight Sleep’s primary explainer across web, social, paid media, and CX.
The launch landed inside Eight Sleep’s strongest stretch to date: 2025 brought the Pod 5 ecosystem to market alongside a $100M Series D, the company’s first year of free cash-flow positivity, and — by March 2026 — a $1.5B valuation and unicorn status. Our work didn’t drive those numbers on its own, but it was the visual and narrative front door for the products at the center of that growth chapter — the piece customers, press, and investors actually watched to understand what the system did.
At n-others, we specialize in giving complex hardware systems a story people actually want to watch.
See how we approach equally complex systems in our Scalpel AI case study.
Let’s build the next one. Together.
Team & Roles
EIGHT SLEEP
- Kelly Palmer _ Product Design
- Jisoo Sim _ Art Director
- Sabina Blankenberg _ Brand & Comms
- Alexandra Zatarain _ Co-Founder & VP of Marketing
N-OTHERS
- Alejandro Sarra _ Creative Director
- Manuel Frontini _ CGI Artist
- Marcelo Rabuñal _ Motion Designer
- Santiago Luque _ CGI Artist
- Facundo Giacomini _ CGI Artist