Discover Night founder and Durham native Kalle Simpson returned home to grow her luxury sleep and beauty brand in the Bull City
By Rebekah Mann | Photography by John Michael Simpson
Three days before New York City issued its COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, Durham native Kalle Simpson signed a lease for office space to house her company, Discover Night. Within a year, she convinced her team to relocate to the Bull City.
That same confident determination shapes nearly everything Kalle does.
She founded Discover Night in August 2015 as an investor-free company focused on luxury nighttime beauty products designed to offer benefits while you rest. The mission reflects her practical approach to wellness. “Most beauty products ask a lot of women,” Kalle says. “Anything that I can do that makes my life easier and women’s lives easier, I’m passionate about.”
Discover Night’s offerings simplify skin and hair care by putting in the work overnight. The brand’s DualSilk pillowcase, for example, features a reversible design that pairs 100% mulberry silk for hydration with 100% eucalyptus designed to help reduce acne. The goal: Help customers wake up ready to take on the day.
Discover Night chief operating officer Joseph Willet knows Kalle’s persistence firsthand – she spent 10 years patiently recruiting him to work on her team. “Being around her is contagious,” he says. “She sets a pace that elevates everyone. It’s like running a marathon: You think you’re doing well until you’re training alongside an elite athlete, and suddenly your definition of possible changes.”
Kalle built that momentum early. She began her sales career in North Carolina’s furniture and textiles industry after graduating from UNC Wilmington in 2007. Her motivation and connections carried her to New York City, where she spent years as a high-profile account executive selling pillows she didn’t sleep on. When people in her life asked her for bedding accessory recommendations, she was conflicted on what to tell them – until she decided to make her own. Now she spends her time developing items she wholeheartedly believes in; over the course of almost 11 years, she has slept without her brand’s silk memory foam pillow only twice.
“A plane lost it, and I had one sent to Canada and paid all the [shipping] duties because I couldn’t go longer than that,” she says. “It goes everywhere with me.”
Since the success of the original pillow, Kalle has expanded Discover Night’s product line to include sheet face masks infused with hyaluronic acid and silk protein, silk scrunchies, cooling bed sheets and more, but the focus on high-quality materials that create restorative and protective surfaces for skin and hair remains consistent.
The pandemic led to more unexpected opportunities beyond an office relocation. Discover Night donated 120,000 disposable masks to hospitals, nursing homes and other organizations during the national shortage. Kalle also applied the knowledge she gained from her research on skin-friendly fabrics to quickly pivot to manufacturing the brand’s own silk face masks, which captured consumer attention after A-list celebrities, including singer-songwriter Adele and actress Jessica Alba, appeared wearing them.
Media outlets had already taken notice of the company even before its face mask successes; Discover Night appeared on “Good Morning America,” and in publications such as People and Forbes. Kalle says she’s grateful for these features promoting her business, but hometown recognition as a 2026 Woman of Achievement is, when measured in terms of sentiment, among the most meaningful. “It’s going to sound like I’m just saying that for this interview, but I truly feel authentically about it,” she says.
Her tenacity is likewise valued by other passionate, local entrepreneurs. Eve Botanical Lounge owner Uma Ramiah says Kalle offered extensive support leading up to the cocktail bar’s opening on East Parrish Street in early March. “We’re lucky to have Kalle Simpson in Durham,” Uma says. “She loves her hometown, represents it hard, believes in it and wants to see it thrive.”
Kalle says she’s working to further incorporate Discover Night into the local industrial landscape and, while she’s not certain of all the ways that goal will come to fruition, the company is starting with a contract to supply its travel-friendly, dissolving toiletry sheets to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.
“We’re here integrating ourselves in the fabric of what North Carolina is: It’s textiles, it’s military,” she says. “Your inspiration is always going to come from your environment. All you need is to believe in your place.”
Kalle celebrates Durham as her place – in fact, her best friend Alison Griffith, who she’s known since they were students at Carrington Middle School, jokes that Kalle’s the city’s future mayor – for many reasons, including her family ties. Her mother, Susan Simpson, a retired Duke University Hospital nurse, raised Kalle and her siblings, Sam Simpson and Victoria Simpson Fulton, as a single parent. Sam and his family still live locally, and Kalle cherishes time with her niece, Grace Simpson, 15, and nephews Eli Simpson, 9, and Samuel Simpson, 17, as well as sister Victoria’s sons, Otis Fulton, 9, and Hank Fulton, 7, who live in San Francisco.
Moving back to Durham also allowed Kalle to support her mother through some health challenges; she says Susan’s example continues to guide her approach to leadership.
“As a woman, her work ethic is definitely something I aspire to,” Kalle says. “[She taught me] to be consistent and honest in how you treat people.”
But she says one of the most important lessons she’s learned in life is to trust her gut. She’s known for telling those around her to always “swing for the fences,” but only if intuition backs the risk when stepping up to bat.
“Your body will [understand] things before your logic does, but in business, logic is respected more,” she says. “So you have to be firm when something doesn’t feel right; you have to have strong faith in yourself.”
