Lola Blankets

The first 300 Lola blankets arrived at a 400-square-foot studio apartment in Los Angeles and left room for very little else. Tommy Higham wrote in Utah Business that the refrigerator and stove could barely open, and that the only clear paths ran from the front door to his bed and bathroom. Lola Blankets now has offices in New York City and in Lehi, Utah.

The blanket came from his mother, Amy. During years of living with breast cancer and its treatments she found comfort in a soft, cream-colored faux fur blanket, and before she died she made a replica for each of her children, with a handwritten note. Tommy and his brother Will founded Lola in 2021 in her honor, according to the company. The name is the nickname Amy had given herself.

Tommy was selling pharmaceuticals in Los Angeles at the time and kept his job while the first batch shipped. He shot the early product photos himself and borrowed friends with large Instagram followings as models. Will, then a consultant at McKinsey, joined to handle the part of the business that Tommy said he was unaccustomed to running. In the first weeks a company ordered 500 blankets that Lola did not yet have, and the brothers said yes and stayed up all night helping the manufacturer finish the order. Tommy wrote that revenue grew seven times between the first year and the second.

Utah came when Tommy quit his job to run the company full time. He wrote that he saw no reason to stay in California, that he knew the area and that he had connections with influencers here. Since the move, he said, the business has kept growing, and he wants it seen as more than a Utah brand: the spring campaign was shot in Tokyo, and the weighted blanket launched in Iceland. The 400-square-foot studio was a long way from both.

What the company sells has spread from the original blanket to pillows and pet beds, and the brand's own count puts its five-star reviews above 35,000. The faux fur is described on its product pages as OEKO-TEX certified, and a Lola Original lists at $325 in the large size. Tommy also wrote that Lola now manufactures overseas, which is why this listing is about where the company is run from.

Once a month Tommy brings blankets to the breast oncology division at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, where Amy was treated, so that every woman being treated there for Stage 4 breast cancer gets one. A photo of Amy goes into the box of every order.