When our owners, Dick and Pauline Beijen, founded Devon Duvets, they were living on a smallholding on Dartmoor, having given up their busy international careers to lead a more sustainable lifestyle.

By the time Monty Don featured them in ‘My Dream Farm’, and the handcrafting of our award-winning duvets was underway, their two children, Anna Rose and Jake, were still young and at Primary School - but old enough to hear all about how beautiful British wool can be turned into duvets, toppers and pillows. Sitting at the kitchen table, they would listen to Dick and Pauline talk to local farmers, the British mill that would clean and prepare the wool and to customers who wanted to chat about their ‘sleep stories’ and find out how wool could help them to sleep better.

Fast forward 12 years and Devon Duvets is still proud to be individually handcrafting duvets, toppers and pillows made from natural, sustainable materials, including our recently launched and innovative, patented THREE Duvets range.

Although no longer based at Dick and Pauline’s home, our workshops are tucked away in an eco-friendly building at the end of a wooded valley on the edge of Plympton, complete with our talented, highly skilled seamstresses and our dispatch and customer care teams.

Anna and Jake initially started out by helping every so often, such as during the school holidays, but now having reached 21 and 20 respectively, they made the decision to join their parents and learn all about the business.

Jake is learning the ropes on the management team and works with Dick on planning production each week, liaising with our brilliant suppliers in ensuring our materials continue to be sustainable and responsibly sourced. Jake also studied IT and so

ARE YOU A NIGHT OWL OR A MORNING LARK?

Recent research about sleep and sleep behaviours was carried out by the British Wool organisation, and with some surprising results.  Here’s a few things they discovered:

• On average, Brits wake up three times a night. There are many reasons for this, including being too hot; 48% polled specified this issue as the cause for a disrupted night’s sleep.
• 48% of us find it difficult to ‘switch off’ with 22% worrying about work and what we need to do at the office the next day.
• Of those asked as part of the study, 78% of Britons insist on sleeping on the same side of the bed each night.
• Almost two thirds (62%) confessed that they snore at night – with 12% admitting they do it all the time!

The study also revealed that Britain is home to a nation of night owls, with six in ten Brits saying that they go to bed late and like to sleep in, compared to 40% who describe themselves as morning larks or early birds.

Morning Larks tend to go to bed early, wake up early and feel their best as the day begins. They also tend to have less energy in the late afternoon and evening, resulting in them finding it hard to stay awake past a certain hour. Research has shown that early risers tend to have an easier time adjusting to standard daytime schedules, which can make it easier to function at workplaces that operate during the day or have an early start.  Morning Larks are also known as ‘early birds’, a term which has its origins in a 17^th century proverb – ‘the early bird catches the worm’.

Night owls tend to stay up late and enjoy sleeping in. They feel their best later in the day and have more energy at night. The downside to this is that they often feel tired after waking up early and can have a hard time staying alert during the day. As most of society is structured aroun