Traditional manufacturers adopting some of Casper’s Bed in a Box methods.
Casper is not your father’s mattress company. In fact, Casper is changing the way mattresses are designed and sold, winning the love of millennials, sending established firms scurrying to catch up and, along the way, achieving $100 million in cumulative sales in its first two years of business.
The New York City company – the brainchild of a group including co-founders Neil Parikh (COO) and Luke Sherwin, chief creative officer – launched in 2014. Parikh, son of a sleep doctor and a one-time medical student, started out with the idea of disrupting the sleep industry.
It took them eight months of testing existing mattresses to come to some conclusions. First, they’re all pretty much the same product with different labels, as Parikh told Inc. magazine.
But people all need basically the same thing: back support. That led Casper to develop one mattress (a box spring really isn’t necessary), creating a patent-pending process to combine memory foam for support with a layer of open-cell latex foam to enhance its coolness and bounce.
The ingenuity continued with their approach to getting the mattress in people’s hands. Selling it online was the first step toward winning the millennial market (which tends to want to order everything fast and easy online). Compressing it to fit in a box the size of a small refrigerator for dramatically cheaper shipping costs was another.
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Casper has also won fans through its customer-centricity. In an unusual move that competitors are now starting to follow, it allows people 100 days to test the mattress in their homes. The company will take it back, at no charge, if customers are dissatisfied.
The typical practice among mattress retailers is to charge a restocking fee of several hundred dollars. According to Parikh, “Our return rate is low, and we try to donate those mattresses to a local charity, which is more cost-effective than taking them back halfway across the country to refurbish and resell.”
Casper also is applying its ingenuity to the broader sleep market. Beyond the bed in a box, it has conducted considerable consumer research into materials and their various densities for ideal pillows and sheets before offering up what they considered unique products. The team discovered, for example, that the “ideal” 1,000 thread count for sheets is not so idea after all. According to Parikh, “the more threads, the more filler fiber, which means the sheets are going to sleep really hot.”
The mattress industry is responding to the impact of Casper and other direct-to-consumer innovators such as Leesa and Tuft & Needle. Not only are major players such as Sealey and Mattress Firm (which now owns the largest U.S. mattress retailer, Sleepy’s) coming out with their own boxed foam mattresses, available online only, they’re also following Casper’s example by adopting consumer-friendly policies.
Both Cocoon by Sealy and Mattress Firm’s Dream Bed come with two queen sized choices – firm or soft for Cocoon and the original or Cool Dream Bed with a gen-infused layer – and are priced competitively with Casper’s.
And they’ve matched Casper on the customer try-out phase, if not gone it one better: the Dream Bed offers an unprecedented 180-day trial period. And Mattress Firm also has upped the ante for charities: It donates one bed in a box to charity for each one sold.
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