How Embr Labs is Changing Lives with Temperature Tech | Sam Shames

Ayush Jain: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of HealthTech with Purpose.

Ayush Jain: Today we have Sam Shames from Embr Labs. Hi Sam, how are you?

Sam Shames: I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

Ayush Jain: Great. It’s a pleasure to be able to find out time and interview you, Sam, because the work that you’ve been putting in building Embr Labs has been fantastic. I was really looking forward to bringing this story to our subscribers. So Sam, why don’t we start right from the start, from your days at MIT to building Embr Lab’s first prototype? I read somewhere it was a prototyping competition you participated in and it was called Wristify that time. Tell us more about those days and how did you get the idea around the startup?

Sam Shames: That’d be my pleasure. So we came up with the idea for a wearable that heats and cools from being too cold in an over-air-conditioned lab on campus. My co-founders and I were all engineering students at MIT, and we kept having to put on sweatshirts in June to stay comfortable. We thought, man, what if there could be a better way? So we said, let’s try to make a wristband that heats and cools.

We built our first prototype that summer. We certainly didn’t think it would become a startup. The name Wristify was just the very first thing we came up with. But we built the first prototypes, and we thought it felt really good. We were like, “Wow, this thing actually works.” Then we let other folks try it, and they said it felt good.

The number one question we would get when we showed the device to someone was, “Does this work for hot flashes?” And that’s really, in many ways, the story of Embr Labs—market pull of this technology we developed for wearable heating and cooling, towards hot flashes as a primary use case.

So we spent that summer—summer of 2013—doing the prototyping. We won the prototyping contest in October 2013, and the idea went totally viral. From that virality, we started to get emails from people all over the world saying two things: “Temperature is the biggest pain point in my life,” and “When can I buy this?” That was the moment we realized there’s something more than a student project here. We have to look at actually building this into a startup.

Ayush Jain: And did you finish your degree, or you jumped the gun?

Sam Shames: I did. We didn’t know very much about startups. It was the fall of my senior year, so I only had one and a half semesters to go. We didn’t have the funding or the know-how. Instead, we really leveraged the resources of MIT. They have great resources for aspiring entrepreneurs. We were able to take classes on entrepreneurship and use that to get feedback and structure around the idea.

After graduating, we did the summer accelerator at MIT called Delta V, where we got even more dedicated resources toward the startup, including non-dilutive funding and other elements to help us reach, as they would say, escape velocity.

Ayush Jain: Great, great. Let’s go a bit deeper around this subject. What were those key inflection points, technologically and commercially, that validated your product market fit?

Sam Shames: Technologically, it was first figuring out how to actually make a wearable that heats and cools. We came up with the idea but thought, we can’t be the first people to have this idea. Does it exist? Has it been done before? Certainly, people had tried it, but from a technology standpoint, what you realize quickly is that cooling—especially—but really changing temperature overall is very power-intensive. It uses a lot of energy.

To actually change the body temperature requires hundreds of watts of power—not really compatible with a wearable device. What we realized was there’s a big difference between changing your body temperature and changing how warm or cold you feel. Just changing the temperature of one part of the body has a system-level impact. That was our insight.

From there, we figured out the best way to change the temperature of one point of the body: using what we invented and patented—thermal waveforms. It’s not changing temperature statically but dynamically, in a time-varying way. That was the key technological breakthrough: thermal waveforms reduced power consumption and made the sensation of temperature more effective.

That got us through 2013. Then, to find product market fit, we went through several prototype iterations. The next key breakthrough was in 2015 when we had a prototype small and robust enough for field trials. People could use it for two weeks, and it wouldn’t break. It was stylish enough to wear, and we got really good feedback.

Most importantly, we’d ask, “Can we have your credit card for a pre-order?” Enough people said yes that we saw early signs of product market fit. Then, in October 2017, we launched on Kickstarter. Our goal was to raise $100,000; we ended up raising about $630,000 from over 2,800 backers.

Ayush Jain: Great. That’s fantastic. Of course, there’s always a lot of struggle behind it. Tell us more about taking it from prototype to real-world clinical performance. Did you go for FDA approval?

Sam Shames: We decided not to go the FDA route. Even today, we’re a consumer wellness device. We do have HSA and FSA reimbursement in the U.S., though. That came from market pull—people were ready to give us money. If we looked at our cost structure, we could make a healthy margin. So we took the faster path to market.

What we did do, though, is clinical validation. That was in our DNA early on as scientists and engineers from MIT. We wanted to know: is this a placebo effect? We read scientific literature, understood the physiological basis, and ran field trials.

Our first breakthrough was an SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation. We collaborated with UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment on a rigorous study on thermal comfort. The results showed that wearing our first-generation device made people feel up to 5°F more comfortable. That’s like changing a room from 72°F to 67°F—or the reverse.

Since then, we’ve done clinical studies with Johnson & Johnson on menopause and hot flashes, studies for prostate and breast cancer patients, sleep trials, and even studies on dysautonomia—a thermoregulatory disorder. We now have seven published clinical studies.

Sam Shames:
Since then, we’ve done clinical studies with Johnson & Johnson on menopause and hot flashes, studies for prostate and breast cancer patients, sleep trials, and even studies on dysautonomia—a thermoregulatory disorder. We now have seven published clinical studies and have really built up a body of evidence around the effectiveness of Embr Wave for different elements of people’s thermal experience—whether that’s comfort, hot flashes, sleep, or more serious medical issues related to the thermoregulatory system.

Ayush Jain:
Nice, nice. So, tell us more about the partnerships that you had with J&J and Walgreens. What has been your biggest GTM lesson for fellow founders?

Sam Shames:
Absolutely. So, we started with Kickstarter, and then we really just focused on our website for the first couple of years. I think that’s a very important lesson—try to find a channel that you can own so you can have a complete life cycle relationship with the customer. Especially for a first-generation device, we wanted to know—from first awareness through customer support—as much as we could about the customer. That was critical.

Then the second piece was leveraging that to attract inbound attention from other channels. Johnson & Johnson came to us because they were looking for menopause offerings and wanted to explore a partnership. The same happened with Walgreens Boots Alliance. Through Number Seven, a skincare brand they own in the UK, they were also looking for menopausal solutions. So we leveraged our D2C traction to develop inbound leads for partnerships and then pursued those.

Eventually, with our second-generation device, we started to go omnichannel. Today, the product’s widely available. But I would really caution doing that with a first-generation product because you’re giving up margin—and more importantly, control. It’s a lot more to manage: different product listings, positioning, offers, pricing—not to mention just knowing your customer. When someone comes to you with a question, being able to trace their order and their history is much easier when they’ve bought directly from you, rather than from Amazon or another third party where you may know nothing about how they discovered you.

Ayush Jain:
Okay, great. So, from what I understand, did you do any deliberate effort towards these partnerships, or were they more inbound after your product was already making heads turn?

Sam Shames:
Well, the initial contact was them reaching out to us. But we put in a tremendous amount of effort. The first conversation might have been, “Hey, we want to learn more,” but to actually go from that interest to a final partnership—whether that’s selling the product or doing clinical research together—was an enormous effort.

It’s very true that the speed and characteristic time scale of a startup compared with a large company is very different. You really have to be patient to go through a long process with multiple cycles of contract review, legal review, different stakeholders, and occasionally even a corporate restructuring. Patience is the name of the game. Of course, on the other side of that, you can get a really strong outcome when you can point to a partnership and revenue from a multinational company with a global brand.

Ayush Jain:
Right, right. Great. So how do you currently balance your D2C growth with enterprise and clinical partnerships? Is it now more B2B-driven, or is it still more D2C?

Sam Shames:
Yeah, it’s evolved over time. It started with all D2C. Then we started to get some corporate interest, more on the clinical side—so, more like engineering services revenue or clinical research services. Then we opened up indirect channels and saw some really good wholesale revenue.

Now, it’s shifted back toward more balance. Part of how that happened was by strategically asking, “Okay, how do we differentiate our D2C channel?” Because if we’re selling the same product as our wholesale partners on Amazon, BestBuy.com, Walmart.com—what’s the incentive for someone to buy from our website? Price alone isn’t enough.

So, we developed this hardware-as-a-service model. Rather than owning the product outright, customers have the option to pay $20 a month for ongoing access. That gives them a working device with a lifetime warranty, a new device every two years, perks in our rewards program, and access to exclusive giveaways and content. It’s only available on our website.

We launched it last year, and in the first eight months, we grew it from basically zero to almost 15,000 subscribers—close to a $4 million ARR run rate.

Ayush Jain:
Great, great. That’s amazing. So, during this journey, do you feel there’s more value in turning a hardware startup into a service-oriented offering? Would you recommend that to others, or was this more unique to your product?

Sam Shames:
I think any hardware company should try. The broader lesson is that for a long time, we were just a one-time sale product company. We had accessories, but not ongoing revenue. And that model is incredibly challenging. There’s often a strong misalignment between value creation for your customers and value capture for your business.

If you’re delivering value over a long period of time, you need to capture that value on an ongoing basis. Today, you’ve got companies like Whoop, Oura, and Eight Sleep following a pretty common playbook: hardware plus subscription. That wasn’t the case back in 2019 when we were working on our Gen 2 device. We had to adapt.

Hardware-as-a-service has worked well for us. We’ve realized there’s segmentation in the customer base: some want to own the device, some don’t. Originally, we thought it had to be either-or. But offering both allows us to reach more people. For some customers, not owning the device—being able to return it, having the flexibility to cancel—is actually a benefit.

Sam Shames:
So actually offering that as a product option is a way to further capture additional market share.

Ayush Jain:
Right, right. Okay, but in offering it as a service, do you run the risk of someone, let’s say, taking the device and then not paying for the subscription? Do you have, you know, maybe some percentage of bad revenue?

Sam Shames:
Yeah, absolutely. There is a delinquency component. We work with an amazing partner who helps us with that through some front-end screening. It is a trade-off and tuning you have to make, and you have to be careful upfront—because a couple of bad cohorts can really negatively impact your cash flows and your unit economics.

At the same time, there are ways to both screen up front and encourage people to return the device. And to escalate if needed. Those are all things that you need to balance. That’s why I wouldn’t prescribe this model for everyone. What we’ve seen more broadly in the market is that a common approach is to buy the hardware and then pay an ongoing subscription for software. That works too.

Ayush Jain:
Right, right. Great. So Sam, what would be one piece of advice you’d like to give to an entrepreneur who’s starting today? Maybe imagine someone coming out of MIT today—what are the major learnings you’d want to share from your journey?

Sam Shames:
I think the one piece of advice, especially for a technical founder or an engineer, is to really focus on the customer first and foremost. As engineers, it’s so easy to want to just build cool stuff and develop interesting technology. But what often happens is you wind up with something great that no one wants to buy.

We were fortunate to get advice early enough that completely shifted our mindset. We started with technology for a prototyping contest. We had a prototype for wearable heating and cooling and thought we were ready to launch. But the advice we got was: no, no, no—you need to interview hundreds of people who’ve said, “I want this,” and figure out exactly what they want.

That completely transformed our understanding of the product requirements and user experience. That informed the engineering, design, and technology. If you go deep with primary market research and understand your customer, you’ll build a much better product—and ultimately, a much better company.

Ayush Jain:
Great. And what would be some myths around hardware startups in particular? Because I still believe that a software startup has fewer moving pieces compared to hardware. What are some major myths and how should one go about building a hardware startup?

Sam Shames:
Yeah, absolutely. Hardware startups are more complex—you’re dealing in the world of atoms, not just bits. That adds significant complexity.

The first thing is still: focus on the customer. Some of the best hardware startups validate the market before or in parallel with starting design. The challenge with hardware is the chicken-and-egg problem. You need capital to build and launch the product—often more than for a software startup. But how do you raise that capital if you haven’t proven there’s a market?

Use renderings, MVPs, field trials, and prototypes to demonstrate you have paying customers if you can just build the product. That significantly improves your odds of success. People often underestimate what you can do with low-fidelity prototypes or even just good renderings these days.

You should be able to build your whole landing page, drive traffic to it, start marketing, and build in public. That helps bring people along the journey and shows traction.

The last piece is: there’s tremendous upside. In a world where no-code and low-code tools make software easier to build—and therefore less defensible—hardware can actually be more defensible by nature. If you combine hardware with a subscription software model, you can build a powerful business. People tend to form stronger connections with physical products. That translates into loyalty, lifetime value, and willingness to pay.

Ayush Jain:
Right, right. Well, that’s fantastic. So Sam, I came across this news recently—Embr has secured some major patents. If you could share in layman’s terms what these patents represent, in terms of where wearable health tech is headed? Also, give us a bit more understanding of Embr Labs’ next big bets.

Sam Shames:
Absolutely. We’ve been fortunate to build a robust IP portfolio. Today, we have, I believe, 18 utility patents granted across the US and international jurisdictions.

I talked earlier about our foundational research around thermal waveforms. Since then, we’ve built around that. Some of our most recent patents have been around AI, and that’s something we’re really excited about.

We’ve developed AI that can predict hot flashes and deliver heating or cooling in response. One way to think about this is that we have a foundation model for temperature. We’ve collected over 20 million hours of heating and cooling usage data, and we’re now starting to use that to ask: What would it look like to perform thermal inference? That is, to heat and cool people on demand to help them regulate proactively.

That’s part of what the recent patents are about—some of the key enabling technologies to deliver temperature as a service. Or, in other words, to deliver the perfect heating and cooling before you even know you need it.

Ayush Jain:
Great, great. That’s good to know. You mentioned AI—so let’s take a deeper question around that. Your product collects physiological data. What’s your philosophy around where the thin line is between helpful and invasive, especially as we go deeper into connected health? This is becoming more of an ethical responsibility too.

Sam Shames:
Yeah, that’s such an important question. Privacy is critical. Just put on your consumer hat and ask: What do you want the products you interact with to know about your most personal health information?

What I’ve come to believe is that it comes down to two things. One is: understanding the permission your customer is giving you, and being very explicit about that—saying, “Hey, this is what I’m asking you for, and this is why.”

And two: keeping that promise. Once you have the data, are you doing everything you can to keep it safe and secure? Are you following security best practices? Are you giving people the right to delete their data?

If you can do those two things—clear communication about data usage, and treating the data with the utmost care—you’re starting from the right place.

Ayush Jain:
So Sam, let’s move into the next part. Give us a bit more insight into the operations aspect of the company. To build a million-dollar company, what kind of team setup do you have? And what are the key roles really required to build a successful hardware startup? Is there any particular role you feel is often undervalued but is actually critical?

Sam Shames:
We’ve seen our team evolve over the years depending on the company’s stage. For a long time, it was just the co-founders and me. We broadly split responsibilities into three areas—one was business, one was product and customer, and one was engineering and science.

That basic division still holds: you need someone responsible for the business and operations (like HR, finance, fundraising), someone responsible for product and go-to-market strategy, and someone focused on the technical side—engineering, IP, science.

Over time, the staffing within those buckets has changed. When we were developing new products, we were heavier on engineering—mechanical, firmware, software, systems engineers. As we shifted toward go-to-market focus, we built up the marketing team.

But those three areas—business, product/market, and engineering—are the pillars. You need someone who understands what you should build, someone to build it, and someone who can make the business work around it.

Ayush Jain:
Great, great. So, Sam, I do have a quick rapid-fire for you—just a few trivia questions.

Sam Shames:
Sure, let’s do it.

Ayush Jain:
First question—what’s your favorite wearable tech besides Embr Wave?

Sam Shames:
Favorite wearable tech besides Embr Wave… I’ve been trying out the Oura Ring. I’ve really enjoyed the data on sleep and the nudges to think more carefully about how the choices I make impact sleep and recovery.

Ayush Jain:
Most impactful book that you’ve read?

Sam Shames:
From a business standpoint, I really enjoyed the book Monetizing Innovation. It’s all about how companies can build the product around the pricing model.

Ayush Jain:
An entrepreneur you admire?

Sam Shames:
I’ve come to really admire Brian Chesky—maybe a little cliché at this point with what he’s said about “founder mode,” but he seems like a really incredible leader. He’s obviously built an amazing company and done so in a really thoughtful way.

Ayush Jain:
A shout-out to people who were important in your journey?

Sam Shames:
I’ve got to give a shout-out to the team in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at MIT, especially at MADMEC. Mike Tarkanian and the whole staff started us on this journey. They gave us the resources to build our first prototypes and guided us toward the entrepreneurship resources at MIT.

Ayush Jain:
Great. Thank you so much, Sam. That’s a wrap-up. One last question—what’s the best way to reach out to you? And do you offer any sort of mentorship or advisory to companies who would like to learn from you?

Sam Shames:
Yeah, the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. I try to always keep up with my DMs. I’d certainly welcome the chance to talk with other hardware startups. I feel really grateful for all the help I’ve gotten—and we’ve gotten—from people further along in their journeys, and I try to be a good community mEmbr and pay it forward. So I’m always open to having conversations, and potentially more formal advising opportunities as well. I look forward to hearing from your audience.

Ayush Jain:
Thank you so much, Sam. It was a great, insightful episode, and we look forward to following your journey and wish you all the best in your mission.

Sam Shames:
Thank you for having me.