Better Bedder on Shark Tank: Lori Greiner's Equity Deal Became a Licensing Deal, and the Sheet Band Is Now Sold Only From Its Own Website

Better Bedder did get a deal on Shark Tank, but not the one that aired. Nita Gassen and Judy Schott, two friends from Mandeville, Louisiana, pitched their bed-sheet band in Season 12 (the episode aired February 26, 2021), drew offers from three Sharks and accepted $150,000 for 18% from Lori Greiner. A year later the Associated Press reported that the pair “ended up signing a licensing agreement with Greiner” instead. By 2022, Gassen said, it was in more than 3,000 Walmarts and in TV commercials. In October 2026 the company sells only custom-made bands, only from its own website, and says it left Amazon because fighting copycats cost too much.

Did Better Bedder get a deal on Shark Tank?

On air, yes. Local coverage that week agreed on the outcome: three Sharks tried to outbid each other, and, in the words of L’Observateur and Biz New Orleans, Greiner “came in for the final bite at $150,000 for an 18% interest in the company.” The company’s own “Our Story” page says it appeared in “Shark Tank, Season 12; Episode 15, and made a deal with Lori.” The St. Charles Herald-Guide reported that the segment was filmed in Las Vegas in summer 2020, and the AP later reported that the founders got on the show on their second try.

The negotiation is told in more detail in Looper’s 2024 recap of the episode. By that account the founders asked for $150,000 for 10%, which values the company at $1.5 million. Barbara Corcoran offered the $150,000 for 20%, while Greiner and Daymond John each wanted 25%. The founders countered at 18%, Greiner accepted first, and they stayed with her even after Corcoran offered to come down to 15%. Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary did not bid. The AP said Greiner was “the shark they were most hoping to land,” and the choice fits: they took a valuation of roughly $833,000 (run it through our post-money valuation calculator) rather than the $1 million Corcoran was offering at 15%, in exchange for the investor with a home-shopping channel behind her.

The deal that closed was a licensing agreement

That is the part most recaps of Better Bedder on Shark Tank leave out. In a story published by Biz New Orleans on February 7, 2022, the AP’s Sara Pogones wrote that the on-air deal was $150,000 for 18%, “But the pair ended up signing a licensing agreement with Greiner, and Gassen said it’s worked out well even though it’s meant less money for them.”

The terms of that license have not been published. The trade Gassen described is clear enough, though. Greiner’s side brought distribution and marketing the founders could not afford: “We would never get that kind of marketing,” Gassen told the AP. “She is the one pushing it nationally. We have commercials on TV now.” The founders, for their part, gave up revenue rather than equity, which is a different bargain from the one viewers saw.

Who founded Better Bedder

Both founders kept day jobs while they built it. L’Observateur reported that Schott, a New Orleans native and attorney, was COO of the benefits management company Gilsbar. Biz New Orleans described Gassen, originally from Luling, as a liability insurance professional. The idea came in 2018. According to L’Observateur, Schott had bought beds for a summer house that were so awkward to make that her son started sleeping on the couch. The company’s site picks up the story: a fruitless trip to a Home Depot in Mandeville, then a sewing machine, and “Nita taught herself to sew by watching YouTube videos.” Production moved to a sewing shop across the Mississippi from New Orleans (local press named both Algiers and Gretna), and the first market research was a stall at the local Saturday market.

The product is described in Biz New Orleans as “a giant headband that wraps around the sides of a mattress to keep both the fitted and flat sheets in place.” The patent behind it, US 11,350,759 B1, names Judy Cannella Schott and Nita F. Gassen as inventors and Cannella LLC as assignee. It claims priority to April 26, 2018 and was granted on June 7, 2022, more than a year after the episode aired.

What happened to Better Bedder after Shark Tank

The first effect was immediate. “We usually sell between 50-60 a day,” Gassen told the Herald-Guide days after the broadcast. “The last few days sales have been in the thousands. Lori had prepped us for this … it’s called the Shark Tank effect.” Looper reports that the follow-up segment put first-day sales at $157,000.

The figures before and after the show need care. Looper’s recap has the founders telling the Sharks they had done $476,000 in sales in about a year and a half. L’Observateur’s story on the day the episode aired put the total at more than 15,000 units and revenues “nearing one million dollars”, about twice the pitch figure, and nothing in the record reconciles the two. By April 2021 Gassen was telling Biz New Orleans the company had gone from “zero sales to over $2 million,” and Schott said it still had “only two full-time employees.” Then, in February 2022, the AP reported the company was “on track to hit $20 million in sales this year.” That sentence does not name its source; Looper attributes the figure to Greiner on the update segment. Going from $2 million lifetime to $20 million in a single year would be a tenfold jump, and we found no later figure, from any source, that confirms it happened.

Retail is documented the same way, as plans at a point in time. Gassen told the AP in 2022 that the Better Bedder was in more than 3,000 Walmarts, would “soon” be at Target, Belk and Kroger, and that a QVC appearance was “in the works.” We found no confirmation that the Target, Belk, Kroger or QVC launches happened.

Is Better Bedder still in business, and who owns it now?

Yes, as of October 23, 2026, though in a narrower form. The website is live under a 2026 copyright notice, with customer reviews dated as recently as this month, and it carries a footer crediting Cannella LLC, the patent’s assignee. Its home page says: “We no longer sell standard size Better Bedders because most mattresses, even kings and queens, are not the standard size when you actually measure them.” The store now lists two products, a Custom Better Bedder at $109, with options listed for Tempur-Pedic, Sleep Number, Nectar and other mattresses, and a $12.50 accessory called the Nita Nob. The site describes the Better Bedder as “triple patented,” and its footer shows the one patent number above.

The site also says the product “is only sold on our website. NOT SOLD ON AMAZON. All others are fakes and won’t work.” The “Our Story” page explains why: “We do not sell on Amazon as there are so many copycats after our appearance on Shark Tank and it was too expensive to keep fighting.” Because the company says it has no official Amazon listing, we have not linked to one. Whether the Greiner license is still in force is not documented.

What founders can take from it

First, the deal on screen is a starting point. Better Bedder’s became a license, and the founders traded a share of revenue for national marketing they could not have paid for. Gassen’s verdict, as the AP reported it, was that the arrangement had worked out well even though it meant less money for the two of them. Second, TV exposure brings copycats with it, and here the patent was granted more than a year after the episode aired. The company’s response was to walk away from the biggest marketplace rather than keep paying to police it. Third, a founder can shrink a product line on purpose: dropping standard sizes for custom-fit bands gives up volume in exchange for an exact fit, which is the reason the company gives. And the advice Gassen gave in the 2022 follow-up segment, quoted by the AP, still stands: “Go with what you feel,” she said. “Stick to it, pound the pavement and it will pay off.”

Better Bedder is the only deal in our sample that turned into a licensing agreement; see Shark Tank deals by the numbers. Cup Board Pro took a different route to the same place, as a Williams-Sonoma exclusive.