FIRST LOOK
Once upon a time, I made an app. And you're still in it.
It was for women who couldn't sleep. Hypnotherapy, mostly — proper sessions, written by proper therapists. That was 2017. A hundred and fifty thousand women found it. Forty thousand of them left a review. The Guardian put it on a list of apps every woman should own, which I have still not got over.
Most of them are long gone. You're not. You've been here for years, and that's the reason you're reading this before anybody else.
And then I stopped using it.
Not on purpose. I just stopped reaching for my phone at night. I'd get into bed and the last thing I wanted was the bright rectangle that had been shouting at me since seven that morning. So I'd lie there instead. Awake. Thinking about emails.
Which is an odd thing to admit, when you've spent years building the thing that lives on the phone.
Then we looked at the data, and it was the same story. So we asked you about it, and so many of you said exactly the same thing back. The phone is the problem. You want it, and you don't want it.
And every session you'd ever bought lived on it.
So we're going the other way.
Everyone in this industry is building another app. Another score, another streak, another notification telling you your sleep was poor — as if you hadn't noticed.
We're taking it off the screen instead. Into your hands. Something you can actually pick up and keep by your bed.
So. Here's what we made.
Well — more making. It's still in progress.
Sleep headphones. Not earbuds, not a chunky headset — a soft fabric band with thin flat speakers hidden inside, so you can lie on your side and feel absolutely nothing digging in.
The idea is that your favourite Clementine sleep sessions come off the phone and into this. You tap a card, or press one button, and they just play.
It washes at 30°. I knew you'd ask.
And here's the bit nobody expects.
Your Clementine sleep sessions come on cards — because we don't want you sucked into your phone at night when you're trying to unwind.
You tap one on your phone. The session starts. Then you put the phone down — in the drawer, in another room, wherever you like. And you just listen.
Why a card and not just the app.
Because at eleven at night, a bright screen is the enemy. You open your phone to start a sleep session and forty minutes later you're still awake reading something you didn't mean to read. Everyone has done it. I have done it this week.
So every sleep session comes on a card. You tap it on your unlocked phone, the session opens and plays, and the phone goes face down. No scrolling, no browsing, no getting pulled somewhere else on the way.
At 3am, you don't need any of it.
It's 3.07 and you're awake, working out how much sleep you could still get if you dropped off right now.
So Get Back To Sleep is built into the band itself. Not a card, not the app, not your phone. One button in the dark, and someone kind starts talking. Seventeen minutes.
1,809 women have reviewed that session. 1,704 of them said it worked.
You buy it once, and it's yours.
The band, the cards, the sessions. All of it. No subscription. Nothing to cancel. Nothing that quietly takes money from your account while you're asleep.
And in your new app you can browse the whole library and listen to any session free, once. Not a thirty-second preview, not the first two minutes — the whole thing, all the way through, before you decide anything.
If you love it, you buy it and it's in your library permanently. If you don't, you close it and you've lost nothing, and neither of us has to pretend.
That's the opposite of how this normally works, and it's deliberate. I'd rather you heard a session and thought 'no, not for me' than paid £7.99 on a hopeful description and felt daft about it. Nobody sleeps better having been sold to.
What is happening to my current app?
Short version: nothing today, and nothing you have to act on.
Your app keeps working. The hypnotherapy app you've been using stays open until 1 September 2027. Nothing switches off before then.
Your subscription. If you're on a monthly plan, it's still there and you can keep renewing right up to 1 September 2027 if you'd like to. If you were on an annual, six-month or quarterly plan, I've withdrawn those — they won't renew again. That was my decision, not something you did, and I made it because I didn't want anyone paying a year in advance for an app I already knew we were winding down. You can check your own expiry date inside the app.
The new app arrives in October. It's free to come across, whenever you like — you don't have to buy the Sleep Set, and there's no subscription. Move over on day one or next summer, it's the same either way.
And two sessions come with you, free, forever. You choose them. That happens whether you order anything today or not.
If your plan runs out before October and you want to keep listening in the meantime, the monthly plan will get you there.
And you go first.
There are a thousand of these, and we're not making this design again.
Tonight it's just you — a small group of women who've been with Clementine for years. Next week I'll open it up to the rest of the community, and after that to everybody else. You're going first because you were here first. I'd rather you lot had them than strangers, and that isn't a sales line, it's just true.
The first five hundred also get a spare band, so there's always one ready while the other's in the wash.
And you can take up to three sets if you'd like to — one, if you're outside the UK. I put that in because I kept thinking about the other women in your life who could do with a bit of extra TLC when it comes to rest and sleep.
Any questions at all, just email me — hello@clementineapp.co.uk