That is why Glimp co-founders Jefta Vriend and Erwin Rietveld developed a method to make breathing exercises easier. Customers can hold the pebbles they developed in their hands, and are guided through the exercises by the vibrations. These exercises have been known to help people relieve stress and be more mindful of their body, and the hope is that they will be able to cope with their stress better if they can control their breathing.
Struggle between sessions
The idea for starting Glimp was first sparked in 2021 when Jefta’s wife had to stay home with a burnout. Jefta saw that within psychological treatment, people often miss the support at home. It is sometimes difficult to follow-up on the psychologist’s homework. As a product engineer, he decided to try and develop something that could help her to stay calm in between sessions and focus more on the body than the psyche.
A few months later, the first pebbles were developed. With a unique sensor that can track the breathing, the pebbles guide the breathing exercises and also monitor the user’s progress. In a large study, Glimp showed that their product can reduce stress by 19 percent within a month, and that users have a 12 percent less chance of getting burned out.
In the west, we have long ignored the power of breathing in solving health problems. Breathing is a fundamental part of life, and you can really reduce stress by breathing more consciously.
Contact with therapists
With the pebbles, Glimp aims to make a difference for all stress-related health problems, so they have a wide audience in mind. They already see orders from people who want to relieve their stress or professionals that want to help people with a dysfunctional breathing pattern. But the majority of sales happen through their contacts with breathing coaches and other therapists, who often prescribe the pebbles to their patients so they can keep training in between sessions.
This link with healthcare professionals is very important to the founders, because they want to get their product to the people that need it the most. And since almost all other programs focus more on cognitive exercises and less on the body and the effect breathing can have, Jefta and Erwin are positive that they can make a difference in this field. They also collaborate with therapists to develop a standardized, data-driven breathing therapy, because these kind of exercises still need to be standardized.
We see a lot of interest from markets we didn’t even anticipate, like a marathon runner that wanted to improve his breathing and pregnancy clinics that wanted to teach pregnant women to breathe properly. It is great to see that our product has so much potential.
Get out of the building
According to Jefta, joining the YES!Delft Validation lab in 2021 really helped Glimp to get where they are now. Through the program, they learned to fall in love with the problem, not only the solution, and got the courage to step out of the building and talk to potential customers, even when the prototype wasn’t really finished yet. And recently, they also won the Vitality program organized by YES!Delft, and they get to implement their creative solution for workplace vitality at the Municipality of the Hague. Employees can order Pebbles through their vitality budget at work.
Several investors, a Rabobank Innovation Loan and an MIT R&D subsidy from the Dutch government helped them to get their pebbles to where they are now, with validation from experts and a well-oiled production. In the next months, Glimp hopes to sell the new batch of pebbles that they are working on right now, and get them in the hands of the customers that need them the most.
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