Pocket Kado global launch
World Sleep Congress 2023, Rio de Janeiro
Overview
ROLE
Lead Designer, Creative Director, & Cofounder
VENUE
World Sleep Congress 2023, Rio de Janeiro
BOOTH SIZE
7m x 7m
TIMELINE
2 Months
The World Sleep Congress is the premier global gathering for sleep science researchers, clinicians, and industry – held in 2023 in Rio de Janeiro. For Revery Labs, it was the stage we chose to officially launch Pocket Kado, our mobile sleep therapy app. As bronze-level sponsors, we had a 7m × 7m footprint at the entrance of the exhibit hall – the first booth every attendee would see walking in.
I led all creative and design work for the activation end to end: concept, layout, graphics, merchandise, printed materials, conference-wide signage, and social media. With under two months from brief to booth, and a production partner in Rio, Poli Design, to coordinate with across time zones, this project demanded both creative clarity and operational speed.
Research and Discovery
Designing for an audience of sleep scientists at a global conference – not a typical brief.
The World Sleep Congress audience is uniquely specific: researchers, physicians, and clinicians who study sleep for a living. Making a credible impression in that room required a booth that could hold both the scientific legitimacy of our behavioral science foundation and the warmth and playfulness of the Pocket Kado experience – a consumer app built around Kado the koala and a cast of characters designed to make emotional wellness feel approachable.
The strategic decision was to lean into the experience rather than away from it. Rather than present Revery Labs as a clinical product company, we built the booth as an extension of the app's world – a place where conference goers could actually feel what Pocket Kado was about: rest, connection, and quiet joy. That concept shaped every design and spatial decision that followed.
Challenge and Solution
Playful, inviting, joyful – a 49-square-meter lounge that turned a sleep conference into a moment of genuine rest.
The compressed timeline ruled out custom-fabricated booth structures from the start. Working with Poli Design in Rio, I adapted their prefabricated modular system and designed all the graphics to fully transform the structures – making the booth feel cohesive and intentional rather than off-the-shelf. The constraint became a forcing function: every graphic had to work harder because the architecture couldn't.
The spatial concept centered on lounge culture: comfortable, welcoming, a counterpoint to the intensity of a full conference schedule. We offered free tea and coffee, tote bags, and a series of interactive experiences designed to bring the app's core emotional logic into the physical space. An interactive lantern wall invited attendees to write down their worries on post-its and release them – mirroring a central mechanic in the app. A backlit LED window recreated Kado's living room as a photo moment. Life-size cutouts of the app's characters – Kado the koala, Looba the llama, and Rulu the raccoon – anchored the space visually and gave people a reason to stop and engage. A custom inflatable version of Kado, produced specifically for the conference, became the booth's centerpiece – immediately recognizable, distinctly ours, and impossible to walk past without noticing.
Production challenge
Coordinating booth graphics, printed materials, merchandise production, an inflatable mascot, and a remote fabrication partner in Rio de Janeiro – all within a sub-two-month window – required simultaneous parallel production streams and airtight communication across time zones.
Implementation
Every surface, every touchpoint, every giveaway – one cohesive world.
Design production covered spatial, print, digital, and experiential outputs simultaneously. Conference-wide banners extended the Pocket Kado visual identity beyond the booth itself, building presence throughout the venue. Social media content was developed in parallel to amplify the launch in real time before and during the event.
- Wall vinyls
- Inflatable mascot
- LED window display
- Interactive lantern wall
- Conference banners
- Printed program
- Printed flyers
- Tote bags
- Social media
- iPad demos
Results and Impact
We came to launch. We left with an award.
Pocket Kado made its official debut at the World Sleep Congress to a room full of the world's leading sleep researchers – and the response exceeded what we'd set out to achieve. The booth drew consistent traffic throughout the conference, with the interactive experiences and lounge atmosphere doing exactly what they were designed to do: turn strangers into people who understood what our app was about before they'd ever opened it.
NSF SleepTech Award 2023
Pocket Kado was named a winner of the National Sleep Foundation's 2023 SleepTech Award – recognition given to products making a meaningful contribution to sleep health technology. The award was announced briefly after the conclusion of the 2023 World Sleep Congress.
