MICHEALENE RISLEY SPECIAL GUEST ON SENIOR NATION WITH HOST PHYLLIS AYMAN

Tonight's special guest is Michealene Risley. Michealene is the founder and CEO of Imbibe, a U.S.-based sleep company focused on one thing: helping people actually feel better when they wake up. Imbibe makes pillows that use copper, silver, and cooling technology to support alignment, ease pain, and make sleep more comfortable and restorative.

Before starting Imbibe, she spent years building and growing brands in sports, apparel, and gaming. She helped build Adidas maternity as a licensee program, creating product for pregnant athletes and active women at a time when that customer was mostly overlooked. In video games, she worked on both the Tiger Woods and Sonic the Hedgehog franchises as gaming properties, which went on to become billion-dollar global businesses. Those experiences taught her how to listen closely to what people actually need and then turn that into products and stories they want to come back to.

Imbibe is that skill set pointed at sleep. From the beginning, she designed the company around a simple idea: a pillow is personal. Because of that, Imbibe offers one of the strongest return policies in the category and treats each customer as a relationship, not just an order number. She and her team pay close attention to what customers report back: less shoulder pain, better neck alignment, fewer issues with borderline sleep apnea, and deeper sleep. That feedback shapes how the product continues to evolve.

Imbibe pillows have ended up in the hands of Grammy winners, celebrities, and professional athletes, including NFL player Carl Lawson and U.S. Olympic athlete Rachel Dincoff, along with plenty of people who will never be on a stage or a field but simply want to sleep without hurting.

Alongside her work as a founder, Michealene is a longtime human rights activist. She brings that perspective into how she builds her company: prioritizing integrity, aiming to keep as much of the process in the United States as possible, and looking ahead to a national impact partner so that every pillow sold can also support a larger cause.

Across her career, whether in sports, gaming, or sleep, the throughline is the same: use good design and honest business to make everyday life a little more humane.