About Koriboshi
Hi, we’re Alan and Linna — and we spend a lot of time in saunas.
What started as a post-climbing ritual at our local gym slowly became something we built into our everyday lives. We loved the feeling of slowing down, sitting in the heat, and having twenty minutes where there was really nothing else to do.
For Alan, that ritual started to mean even more after losing his dad to cancer.
After spending more than a decade working in tech and designing products at places like Apple, LinkedIn, Meta, and Bloomberg, he had spent a lot of his life thinking about work, craft, and building things well. Losing his dad made him think much harder about how he was spending his time — and, more broadly, how we take care of ourselves while we’re here.
Sauna became one small part of that.
There was just one problem: Alan’s head would overheat way before the rest of his body was ready to get out.
We started looking for sauna hats, but most of what we found didn’t feel like something we actually wanted to wear. A lot were made from wool or felt, were hard to wash, or just felt disconnected from the way we approached sauna.
While traveling in Asia, we noticed people using towels to protect their heads from the heat. Then in Japan, we came across soft cotton sauna hats that felt much closer to what we were looking for — simple, functional, washable, and thoughtfully made.
That idea stuck with us.
Alan being a product designer meant he couldn’t really leave it alone. We started asking what a sauna hat could feel like if it were designed as something you actually wanted to use every session — not just something you put up with because it worked.
That became koriboshi.
Kori = ice. Boshi = hat.
A Japanese-inspired sauna hat made for people who genuinely love the ritual. Soft, breathable, easy to wash, and designed to help you stay comfortable in the heat a little longer.
It’s a small thing, but that’s kind of the point. We believe taking care of yourself is often made up of small things you actually look forward to doing.