Dr Melanie Woollam, a leading Osteopath from Sydney, and I have been collaborating to design the perfect heat pack that is both effective and beautiful.

Since it's first design nearly five years ago, we have improved the shape, amount of rice used and the range of sizes available. It's been great to hear the professional input of Dr Woollam in the design and development of the heat packs. Plus we've heard 'the voice of the customer' after selling hundreds of heat packs at her health centre, Body of Life on the North Shore of Sydney.

Heat packs are great for providing relief from muscle tightness and pain resulting from tension, stress or postural strain. Dr Melanie Woollam

The three 'must-haves' in the perfect heat pack include:

1. Great coverage

Heat packs need to sit comfortably across the required area, often the shoulders and neck, or the upper/lower back. Coverage is essential because the warmth needs to extend across the sore area to increase blood flow to maximise the 'soothing feeling' in the achy area. This means that the heat packs work well in reducing pain in sore muscles.

We recommend the use of heat packs to our clients at home to decrease muscle spasm and pain often resulting from stress, postural fatigue, osteo arthritis or injury.

Heat packs provide relief by interrupting a ‘pain-spasm-pain cycle’ by dampening down the ‘pain receptors’, relaxing painful muscles and improving tissue blood flow.

2. Feel soft

I once used a heat pack that was a plastic, and actually had quite sharp edges. It felt terrible when it was placed on your skin! To use it, you always had to grab a tea towel to wrap it up in to make bearable to use. What a terrible design! As you can imagine, designing a heat pack that feels amazing on your skin was vital when we designed our heat pack, without needing to add something to it. While my first heat packs were a cotton fabric, I now use 100% linen to give a great look and feel. Speaking of looking great...

3. Look amazing

As I said, Dr Woollam and I collaborated to design and create the perfect heat pack to help people in their journey to health. We knew it needed to have great coverage and feel soothing for people to want to use it, plus we wanted it to look beautiful. The result of our collaboration and development was the hand-screen printed, hand-sewn, 100% linen heatpack. It features piping that joins two simple strips of fabric that are beautifully hand screen printed. These professionally designed heat packs are made right here in Sydney, Australia.

Wow! What a joy it has been, and continues to be, to collaborate with Dr Melanie Woollam and the wonderful team of health practitioners at Body of Life to create, develop and sell these amazing products.

I bet you didn't know...

After nearly five years, the heat packs are still sold in their amazing health centre in Frenchs Forest, Sydney. A range of other great health products can also be found at their boutique health store.

In fact, my business actually started with making these heat packs and after initial success with the heat packs I had the confidence to branch out further with other products. Thanks Dr Woollam for the privilege of working alongside you in developing these heat packs! Who knows what else we will come up with...