Offtopic perhaps, but last year I purchased a mattress online from https://www.tuftandneedle.com/. Not really expecting anything, but having heard enough praise for their customer support, I figured I'd take them up on their money-back offer and give it a shot.
It's damned fantastic, though the entire experience was foreign as hell to me. I was able to order it online (for $700, I think, for the King model), have it delivered on the day I selected. While nobody set it up for me, it came in a box that just sort of fully expanded as I cut it open.
I don't have any particular insight on Casper, but it seems like, to me at least, T&N sort of proved the market, so unless my timeline is off, Casper seems like far less of a gamble than the first entrant to a market would be.
I stopped short of raving about the actual mattress, because I didn't want to come off as a shill... but yes, the mattress is phenomenal. My wife finds it just too stiff for her comfort, so we got a topper for it, but it is otherwise just as good (if not better) than any hotel I've ever stayed in.
The only oddity I've noticed (not a complaint, but different) compared to traditional mattresses is that there's no bolstering on the sides, but understanding how it's made, that's expected. It is different tho, as pushing on the edge of the mattress, historically, has always yielded resistance, while my Tuft & Needle mattress is just as soft there as everywhere else.
Yeah, T&N was definitely first. (Though not so first that they conclusively proved the market, IMO -- whether the mass market will take to ordering mattresses direct is still something of an open question.)
The biggest distinction between T&N and Casper seems to be on the types of materials they use. There's some interesting technical details (some provided by the Casper founders) in this thread from last year at Mattress Underground: http://www.themattressunderground.com/mattress-forum/general...
...Oh and these beds offgas for days if not weeks. I ordered one from Leesa, a similar company offering the same kind of memory foam mattress. They have the same 100 day return policy but it turns out that you have to wait 30 days. Casper has the same 30 day wait period. Presumably this is to give the bed enough time to stop stinking. I don't know about the Casper bed but a week into it the Leesa is very comfortable but still really smells. I knew about the offgassing before I ordered the bed and I'm not a fussy person. I did not know how bad it would be.
For the record, these types of mattresses don't have to offgas. http://keetsa.com/ is the best mattress I've ever had and it didn't off gas of all because they don't use the normal chemicals.
The best stuff on how people think, work, and organize is thousands of years old, why would an article from twenty-five years old not "actually" be interesting?
Noophilia is a disease. You would be well-advised to excise it from your...you.
Similar to Tucker Max and Lioncrest, I heard him on a podcast the other day about how people kept asking him how to self publish and he would go into great detail and they would lose interest, until an entrepreneur yelled at him, she basically said, "this is my problem find a solution" and he came up with a completely novel way to self publish, that was unthinkable before.
Any time someone says "will never do that online," I have an almost Pavlovian response of "sounds like doing that online is a good startup idea." In pretty much every case where people have shown an interest in doing offline, once the experience has been replicated closely enough online, it's ended up working well. The first company I worked at out of school, BuildASign, started as a software to design signs online (incredibly, the founders were the first people to build an online sign designer, at least that they've found). They intended to sell it for a few grand to a local sign shop, as they were all in grad school. All the sign shops they approached said "No one wants to design a sign online! They want to come in and see samples and get help from a person." So the founders threw up a site, planning to do all their fulfillment at a store to demonstrate why they should buy their software. The response was so strong that they quickly decided not to sell, and bought a printer. Today, they have a 100K sq ft manufacturing facility and have had at least 5 straight years of high growth revenue in the high 8 figures (and have been profitable since year 2, plus - until a very recent PE investment - were entirely owned by 3 people).
Point being, once something can be done well enough online, people will do/buy/use it.
I bought a bed from Casper a few months back, and the experience has been nothing short of spectacular. When I tell friends who don't work in startups or are older, they are baffled until I explain it. Buying a bed has to be up there on the list of "I see why someone would hesitate to do it online, without trying it out first," and Casper has figured it out.
There are something like six of these boutique foam mattress startups, of which Casper is one of the newest, cutest, hipster-i-est versions. I've had a Keetsa mattress for about five years now. It's fine -- it was about 20% cheaper than a TempurPedic when I bought it, and the fact that it came vacuum-packed was a gimmick that made it possible to get it into my apartment. It's a little on the firm side, but that's what you get when you have no choice.
(As an aside, nearly twenty years ago, I bought a mattress from the Denver Mattress Company, who were (and are) selling and manufacturing great mattresses for a fraction of the price of the big players. You want to talk about innovation? Talk about those guys, not three hipsters in Brooklyn who got some VC money last year and used it to buy generic foam mattresses from a Chinese supplier.)
That said, there's no way in the world that this market is big enough to support this many startups. Mattresses weren't sold in stores because the companies didn't think people would buy them online; mattresses are/were sold that way because they're like cars -- people buy a new one once a decade. It's hard to build a big business unless you're extracting maximum margin per item sold. It's even harder when five other identical "scrappy insurgencies" are competing on price in the low end of the market.
But hey, cheap VC dollars means cheap mattresses for you. Everyone is thinking about gross revenue and "disruption", but nobody is thinking about business models.
Suppose this is why the "Why now?" question keeps getting more important to VCs.
Imagine a few decades from now, when practically every type of software startup will have been already been tried 100+ times. Maybe the increasing focus on startup "team quality" that's already happening will be a big part of the answer to that question.
I think the early players in the space probably have/had a good argument for that question -- if you're Denver Mattress in 1998, or Keetsa in 2008, you could (perhaps) plausibly claim that the fundamentals of the market had shifted, and make a convincing speculative argument that you could take over a largish industry.
But the rise of five new mattress startups in the last few years? That's just sloppy, herd behavior. Investors are piling into whatever sector seems hot, without doing even the most cursory analysis of the existing players. Why should the 7th startup in this vertical be seen as compelling? Is it because they have bike messengers?
Also, despite the VC's claims, the competitors here aren't incumbents deluded into believing nobody would buy mattresses online, they're incumbents who do sell mattresses online, not to mention scrappy entrepreneurs dropshipping mattresses on Amazon for thin margins. If mattresses were a regular purchase I'd believe a startup could corner the market by doing it much better, if they generally cost in the $xxxx-$xx,xxx range I'd expect they could corner the market by eliminating operational costs that need not exist. But I'm not really sure what assumptions they're challenging here, other than perhaps the assumption that retailers should be profitable?
Huh, I was wondering about the returns, and how you could pack it again if it's so tightly compressed. From the FAQ, the answer is that a courier picks it up and drops it off at a local charity.
42 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadThat's just not true. Their queen mattress costs $850, equal or above many of the listed competitors.
It's damned fantastic, though the entire experience was foreign as hell to me. I was able to order it online (for $700, I think, for the King model), have it delivered on the day I selected. While nobody set it up for me, it came in a box that just sort of fully expanded as I cut it open.
I don't have any particular insight on Casper, but it seems like, to me at least, T&N sort of proved the market, so unless my timeline is off, Casper seems like far less of a gamble than the first entrant to a market would be.
The only oddity I've noticed (not a complaint, but different) compared to traditional mattresses is that there's no bolstering on the sides, but understanding how it's made, that's expected. It is different tho, as pushing on the edge of the mattress, historically, has always yielded resistance, while my Tuft & Needle mattress is just as soft there as everywhere else.
That's fair. I'm more than happy to throw my receipts into Imgur for anyone who thinks I'm a shill. Awesome mattresses, A++ would buy again.
It would be a weird thing to do, but even something like creating fake bank statements isn't particularly hard.
(I'm not implying you are a shill, just commenting on the utility of links to imgur in verifying anything)
(So I would probably take a receipt you posted at face value, but it would be impossible for me to verify it)
The biggest distinction between T&N and Casper seems to be on the types of materials they use. There's some interesting technical details (some provided by the Casper founders) in this thread from last year at Mattress Underground: http://www.themattressunderground.com/mattress-forum/general...
[1] http://www.costco.com/queen-mattresses.html
This is the one I got: http://home.woot.com/offers/purasleep-memory-foam-mattress-4...
https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obl...
Noophilia is a disease. You would be well-advised to excise it from your...you.
As a millennial, I'm really dying to know what it feels like to sleep on a millennial mattress.
Point being, once something can be done well enough online, people will do/buy/use it.
(As an aside, nearly twenty years ago, I bought a mattress from the Denver Mattress Company, who were (and are) selling and manufacturing great mattresses for a fraction of the price of the big players. You want to talk about innovation? Talk about those guys, not three hipsters in Brooklyn who got some VC money last year and used it to buy generic foam mattresses from a Chinese supplier.)
That said, there's no way in the world that this market is big enough to support this many startups. Mattresses weren't sold in stores because the companies didn't think people would buy them online; mattresses are/were sold that way because they're like cars -- people buy a new one once a decade. It's hard to build a big business unless you're extracting maximum margin per item sold. It's even harder when five other identical "scrappy insurgencies" are competing on price in the low end of the market.
But hey, cheap VC dollars means cheap mattresses for you. Everyone is thinking about gross revenue and "disruption", but nobody is thinking about business models.
Imagine a few decades from now, when practically every type of software startup will have been already been tried 100+ times. Maybe the increasing focus on startup "team quality" that's already happening will be a big part of the answer to that question.
But the rise of five new mattress startups in the last few years? That's just sloppy, herd behavior. Investors are piling into whatever sector seems hot, without doing even the most cursory analysis of the existing players. Why should the 7th startup in this vertical be seen as compelling? Is it because they have bike messengers?