Eight Sleep: How a $1B B2C Brand Rebuilt Fulfillment Operations with Medusa

Founded in 2014, Eight Sleep has become one of the most talked-about hardware startups around, redefining sleep through technology. Its flagship product, the Pod, is a smart mattress that adjusts temperature and tracks sleep through built-in sensors and AI-driven insights.

The company has attracted a devoted following among tech leaders and athletes alike, with advocates including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Bryan Johnson, and has grown more than 10x in sales since launching the Pod in 2019, surpassing $500M in global sales.

Entirely digital-first, Eight Sleep sells directly to consumers through its ecommerce website, but as sales and product complexity grew, spanning 30+ markets, multiple 3PLs, and continuous hardware iterations, the team needed a backend that could match its pace of innovation.

Medusa has really been the backbone of our rebuild. It’s been a great platform to build on top of. We were able to iron out years of operational pain and finally bring structure to a process that used to be held together by scripts.

Bob Kinney

·

Staff SWE & Project Lead at Eight Sleep

When Growth Outpaced the Tech Stack

Back in 2017, Eight Sleep launched on Shopify to get to market fast, but as sales and complexity grew, high fees and limited backend control became a bottleneck. The team needed a platform they could fully own and adapt to their global operations.

They moved to a custom Stripe-based setup where invoices became the source of truth for orders. It offered flexibility but added fragility: fulfillment ran on aging Node scripts, manually triggered each morning by a single engineer. If that person was out, orders did not ship.

As demand grew, the setup began to fail. Order data was buried in Stripe metadata, providing no real visibility into fulfillment or tracking, forcing support agents to manually dig into metadata fields just to answer, “Where is my order?”. With customer satisfaction at risk, the Eight Sleep's leadership made it a high priority to rebuild the tech foundation with a system that could handle complex logistics, ensure data consistency, and scale globally.

A Phased Migration to Medusa

Eight Sleep was not looking for another all-in-one platform. They needed a modular foundation that could integrate with their existing systems, support deep customization, and be adopted gradually without disrupting operations. That is when Eight Sleep turned to Medusa.

Medusa struck the right balance between open source flexibility and solid opinionated architecture. It let us build exactly what we needed while staying in control of our code.

Bob Kinney

·

Staff SWE & Project Lead at Eight Sleep

Medusa gave them:

• Complex integrations: Workflows automate and coordinate fulfillment across systems and partners.
• Ownership and flexibility: Full control to build and adapt their platform without constraints
• Gradual migration: Medusa’s modular design let them migrate in phases, starting with fulfillment.

Rather than tackling a full rebuild, Eight Sleep opted for a phased migration to Medusa, starting with the part of their system under the most strain: fulfillment.

Following the Strangler Pattern, they kept their existing Stripe-based checkout while replacing the backend fulfillment logic with Medusa. Stripe webhooks now create orders directly in Medusa, which handles all downstream operations from fulfillment orchestration to inventory visibility. This approach has allowed the team to move quickly without disrupting the customer experience.

Building the Fulfillment Engine

Medusa was implemented at the center of the fulfillment process. When a customer checks out, Stripe webhooks trigger the creation of an order in Medusa, which then takes over all downstream logic. From there, Medusa handles inventory validation, order orchestration, and workflow execution; determining which 3PL to route the order to, generating order fulfillment info, and managing shipment updates through Medusa’s workflow engine.

Medusa’s ready-made modules for orders, inventory, and fulfillment gave the team a strong starting point. With only one full-time engineer on the project, they built a new backend in weeks, replacing years of scattered scripts with a stable, maintainable system that the team can easily extend without growing headcount.

Out of the box, Medusa gave us a lot of what we needed, core modules that just worked. That made it feasible to tackle a project of this size with a single engineer.

Bob Kinney

·

Staff SWE & Project Lead at Eight Sleep

From Manual Scripts to Automated Workflows

Eight Sleep’s new fulfillment engine runs entirely on Medusa. At its core sits Trawler, a custom abstraction layer acting as a single fulfillment provider inside Medusa. Each 3PL is represented as a stock location, while Trawler translates Medusa’s orders into the format each partner expects, whether that is via API or CSV, and manages variant mapping between customer-facing SKUs like “Pod 5 King” and specific hardware versions from manufacturers.

Medusa’s workflow engine powers this setup. Instead of hardcoding logic across scripts and services, Eight Sleep modeled each fulfillment step, from order release to 3PL communication, inventory sync, and shipment updates, as a workflow. These workflows can run, chain, and retry independently, enabling reliable orchestration of hundreds of concurrent shipments across 10+ 3PLs and seven global regions.

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createWorkflow("route-order", ({ orderId, region }) => {
  // ...

  sendOrderTo3PLStep({ orderId, region })
    .config({
      maxRetries: 5 // automatic retries if 3PL has intermittent failures
    })

  // ...
})

Medusa Workflows make it easy to automate and customize any commerce process, with built-in retries and error handling.

By modeling operations around workflows, Eight Sleep laid the foundation for upcoming automation projects, such as shipping-timeline tracking that integrates with Flexport to predict delivery ETAs and notify customers of delays automatically.

Leveraging the workflow system inside Medusa has been incredibly powerful. Once I understood how to model our processes as workflows, it opened up entirely new ways to structure order handling and fulfillment.

Bob Kinney

·

Staff SWE & Project Lead at Eight Sleep

Handling Record Sales and Scaling Further

Within six months, Eight Sleep’s fulfillment system had fully migrated to Medusa, just in time for the launch of Pod 5, their largest and most successful rollout to date. The new backend handled record order volumes with consistent performance and full visibility across every shipment. Customer service teams now have instant insight into order status, reducing “Where Is My Order” tickets and improving response times even as overall volume grows.

With fulfillment stabilized, the team is now extending Medusa to other parts of the business, from storefront and cart management to subscriptions and promotions, with the goal of making Medusa the central source of truth for all commerce operations. Their phased migration shows that teams do not have to rebuild everything at once: with Medusa, they can modernize one layer at a time, gaining flexibility and impact with each step.

In today’s world, there’s really no good reason why a tech-savvy company couldn’t use Medusa to power their full commerce operations. If I were advising any DTC startup, I’d tell them to seriously consider Medusa over insert whatever Shopify or other SaaS tool, to gain flexibility and control.

Bob Kinney

·

Staff SWE & Project Lead at Eight Sleep