A father of three from Salt Lake City, UT, was inspired by his children to develop a new overnight solution to combat bedwetting during potty training—absorbent pajamas.

When Craig Hammond’s oldest child was nearly four years old, he was already daytime potty trained for several months, but still struggled with overnight bedwetting.

“Every night we would have the same problem,” says Hammond, founder and CEO of Peejamas. “If we put him in a diaper, it was almost a guarantee that he was going to pee in it, and if we didn’t put him in a diaper, there would be times when he would pee the bed and woke up with wet sheets.”

One night, Hammond’s son—who wasn’t wearing a Huggies diaper or Pull-Up—snuck into his room to sleep, and in the morning they woke up completely drenched. At the time, Hammond had been working for a tech company that went through major layoffs, and with an interest in getting into entrepreneurship, he spent some time considering an idea for something that would protect the bed, bed sheets, and would help his son potty train at night. That’s when he had an a-ha moment.

“I knew there was training underwear that helps for accidents during the day, but I couldn’t find anything for nighttime, so I had this idea—let’s have pajamas that are absorbent so the child doesn’t really know that they’re wearing something protective,” Hammond recalls.

After speaking to hundreds of parents, he understood that they don’t like what diapers are made of during potty training because the diaper core completely wicks the moisture away, so the child doesn’t realize they urinated. “It doesn’t reinforce what we call standard daytime potty training methods which is go cold turkey, and if your child pees, they recognize that they peed their pants. Diapers and pull-ups don’t really do that.”

Hammond and his team designed Peejamas so that they wick the moisture away, but the child will still feel a wet sensation. “We’ve had so many people email and message us saying their kids didn’t have an accident the first time they wore them, so my theory is kids realize they’re not wearing a diaper and they try to hold in their urine rather than just releasing it.”

It took Hammond about 20 months to develop the final style of Peejamas after initially coming up with the concept. The absorbent pajamas launched on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter on Feb. 14, 2018.

“We launched in the children’s clothing segment within Kickstarter, and in 45 days we ended up having the biggest launch ever in crowdfunding history in children’s apparel,” Hammond says.

The bottoms of Peejamas aren’t completely absorbent; there is a core area similar to a cloth diaper sewn in featuring a bamboo-cotton blend and an impermeable layer that helps contain urine.

“We ultimately decided for the absorbent portion to use a bamboo-cotton blend rather than a hemp-cotton blend (like other cloth diapers) because it’s more absorbent, it’s softer for the child and it’s really eco-friendly,” he explains. “A lot of the design behind Peejamas is that it’s something that we would put on our kids.”

Peejamas are made with Oeko-Tex certified fabrics, and the pajama portion—the shirt and pants—are 100% cotton.

Over an eight-hour period, Peejamas have been tested to hold around 10 ounces of liquid. The bottoms can withstand around 300 washes before losing their absorbent capacity.

Peejamas are currently available at www.peejamas.com in sizes 2t through 6/7.