Jean Godfrey-June had seen specialists about her insomnia. She’d never tried an over-the-counter sleep aid. She used to run beauty coverage at Goop. In Rome this summer, a colleague handed her a few red strips the size of a postage stamp. They melt on the tongue. She took one each night and slept well, jet lag and all.
The strips came from Sleep or Die, a startup founded in 2025. Its founder, Lauren Sudeyko, 32, came out of marketing and sales. In May the company took a $1 million investment from True Beauty Ventures. Chantel Tattoli, writing in the Journal’s Off Duty section, says strips are the newest format chasing gummies. There are strips for sleep, energy, skin, digestion and blood sugar. There’s even a dental strip for dogs. You’ll find them at Erewhon, at Olive Young in Korea, at airports and at 7-11s.
The pitch is convenience. Some people can’t swallow pills. Powders spill. Gummies come with sugar. A strip is none of those things. Jenna Movsowitz, who writes the newsletter Express Checkout, calls strips the logical next step after gummies. In her words, “you don’t have to try that hard to be a wellness girlie.” Brands also say a strip absorbs in the cheek and under the tongue, so it works faster. Researchers who’ve looked at strips have found a catch. A strip that melts fast doesn’t work any faster. Many get swallowed with saliva before the mouth absorbs them. The dose ends up in your stomach, like a pill. Some brands say more of the dose reaches your body. The FDA doesn’t require trials for supplements, so that claim often comes with no trial behind it.
Do the strip math
The Journal’s shopping box lists five brands. Strippies energy strips are $25 for 30. StripIt’s probiotic strip is $33 for 30. Esther Formula’s biotin strips are $38 for 30. NuStrips’ daily essentials are $40 for 30. Sleep or Die’s sleep strip is $49 for 30. Divide by 30 and a strip costs about 83 cents to about $1.63. That sounds like nothing. Now take one every night. That’s twelve boxes a year, so about $300 to $600 for the habit. One beauty PR executive in the story bought eight boxes at once and took a strip a day. Americans are expected to spend about $79 billion on supplements this year, up 7%, by the Nutrition Business Journal’s count. New formats are part of why.
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This is cash flow (M5), with a health-costs footnote. Nobody budgets for a $49 box. People budget for rent and the car payment. The small daily thing slips in under the radar, and then it stays. That’s the business model behind subscriptions, coffee and now strips. We’re not telling you to skip them. Price the habit by the year first, then decide if the sleep is worth it. One more thing. Melatonin and the rest are real substances with real doses. If you take prescriptions, ask a doctor or a pharmacist before you add a nightly strip.
The line in your plan this touches is the small recurring spending that never gets a line of its own. Here’s the check for this week. Pull up last month’s card statement and circle every small repeat buy. Supplements, apps, the coffee subscription, all of it. Write the yearly total next to each one. If a number surprises you, that’s the drip before the leak. A plan review is where you look at the roof before the rain.