HN from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321807
"Casper went to war with popular mattress review site, then financed its takeover"
i guess purchasing behavior is very different for things you buy very infrequently like a mattress?
looking at Costco and a highly rated foam comparable to Casper is $500...
There's also so much info on springs, foam, latex, rubber, on and on. It's overwhelming. Casper has good marketing and make it easy, and since it's so hard to compare, they just need to be close to other prices. They don't need to go full walmart
I thought the promise of all these direct-to-consumer products was to pass savings onto the consumer because they are vertically integrated and cut out scammy middle men.
Seems like all that's happened is they just keep fat margins for themselves.
Judging by their S-1, not so much... They're offering up $100M in shares on $200M of assets and $300M in debt. They spend about as much on marketing as they make from selling the goods, leaving shareholders to pay for all of the administration expenses. If it were a tech company it'd be easy to say this is another debt-fueled startup looking for an exit...
In contrast, our 4 year old Leesa mattress (which we're back on as a primary bed) is fine.
I'm sure that I overpaid with the $900 Leesa, but I don't know how to be sure I'll get a durable mattress if I get a cheap one.
In my experience you can just optimize the firmness to your liking with a pad. If suddenly its too firm or too soft, you can switch it out and not have to replace a whole mattress. Relatives visited and wet the bed? Throw it out and get a new one, your only out a few hundred dollars instead of $1000+.
For couples who want their mattress different ways, that is another market.
I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.
You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.
I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.
Yes, it is. The major mattress stores each have their own custom SKUs to defeat comparison.
> You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like
To some extent, but there's a wear-in period on a new mattress. It takes my body a few days to a few weeks to get used to any new mattress; trying to figure out how that's going to go from a few minutes in a store isn't super effective.
It’s the same exact thing you seen in automotive sales, how do you tell if something is a good price? Well looking at the car compared to other cars in that area may help but what about one model vs another and so forth.
So go lay on a mattress or test drive a vehicle, all that does is tell you if you absolutely hate the item in question not if you actually like it so you add a wide range of prices on very similar items with unlimited reviews or information on them it’s incredibly overwhelming.
Caspar & others (Tuft & Needle) did a great job with the market by appealing to those concerns. 100 night free trial (T&N) and if you don’t like it, we’ll arrange to pick it up/drop it off at a homeless shelter or similar. Casper did something similar.
Once a decade or half decade larger purchases without a baseline is incredibly stressful for most consumers.
Well, we have Google now.
But if you're willing to buy something of that price range without doing a little bit of research then it's an issue.
I had to buy a mattress recently (because the one I had bought online - for a discount price - sucked). I went to the store and tested the different models.
Though I agree the once a decade thing complicates things.
It does make sense that Casper itself needs higher profit margins than Costco due to the differences in business.
if this was objectively proven to be the absolute best foam mattress on the market, I would generally agree that paying top dollar for the best is fine for something you spend a lot of time using, but there's nothing out there that suggests this is any better than anything else on the market. It appears as if it's mostly just good marketing.
So I bought the cheapest thing on amazon with the best reviews in the size that I needed, which was maybe 25% of the price of Casper or Leesa (and those are about half the price of a traditional mattress). It's absolutely fine. If anything, I sleep better knowing that if I destroy it or have to move, I can just throw it out and buy another one.
One note: if you read enough reviews, you'll notice that some budget foam mattresses can have a smell to them. I assume this is the main thing that "premium" foam mattresses have actually addressed, but obviously it's not advertised as "we have the least smelly product!".
It's really as simple as finding a well reviewed hunk of foam, or at least it was for me, as mine arrived odor-free.
I don’t know how places like Casper keep selling mattresses.
People often perceive a mattress as "very important," as sleep is important, and are willing to spend a bit extra if they think the quality will be there and they'll sleep better.
In reality I believe most of these "mattress in a box" companies are selling the same 2-3 mattress manufactured in the same factory.
Personally, I buy mattress in the $300-$500 range. When I was in college I just slept on a brick of foam because that was what I could afford.
I have a Casper. I found it way too firm as a side sleeper, but it was too late to return it, so I bought a $100 memory foam topper from Costco to make it more squishy. I could have saved a lot of money by buying Zinus mattress from Amazon and adding the topper, but oh well.
1. We, the millennial crowd (tm), are insanely stressed on average. Whether it's objectively genuine or falsely perceived, brought on by ourselves or otherwise, it is something we enjoy having control over -- And choosing a "simple" mattress that is straightforward to research and buy caters to that desire perfectly. For awhile Casper only had one mattress, and it seemed like an irrefutably decent mattress. You simply chose the size!
2. If you don't like the mattress you can return it within a period of time. Mattress sellers often offer this, but Casper advertises it. It adds a sense of authenticity to the sale, and I think many people (not just millenials) feel more at peace about buying the mattress without trying it first.
3. It's shipped to you and comes in a box. Usually there's no talking involved. Nobody has to come into your home. Regardless, many of us don't even have a vehicle to pick up a mattress with anyway, nor the available friends to help bring it in through the front door. Maybe a delivery person would help but what if they don't? And what if you miss the delivery?
4. Monthly payments. I feel most millennials don't really care about the total cost of something, as long as there's a monthly payment option that is reasonable. Paycheck-to-paycheck is the format we're used to budgeting in, which easily puts a monthly payment into perspective. $35/month versus $350 upfront is way more manageable.
The market for a $1,095 mattress wouldn't be caught dead shopping at CostCo, even if it's the exact same mattress.
The "Select" branding isn't there to bamboozle them, it's to help them rationalize paying $500 more to be known as someone above shopping at CostCo.
Casper wants one person's $1,095, and another's $599, so they use branding and channel differentiation to scoop $1,694 from both sales, instead of $1,095 for just one, or $1,198 for both.
If we presume their cost is $400, then they go from $398 in margin (two sales at $599) or $695 in margin (one sale at $1,095) to $894 in margin. That's good business!
That's quite an assumption you're making there. I buy a lot of what I need from CostCo, I also spent over $1k on a mattress and have spent further thousands on high quality bedding.
It's erroneous to conflate CostCo with cheap. They're a members only buying club which tends to buy high quality stock in huge quantities, taking advantage of the economies of scale on offer to them.
Plus Zuckerberg shops there. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/photo-facebook-billionaire-m...
Costco isn't for the poors - if anything it's the preferred destination of the upper middle suburban class. they sell high ends things. a lot of it.
i'm guessing Casper's main customer base is, again, cash-strapped millennials, so to argue that these customers are somehow above Costco is a strange take.
“Darien (/dɛəriˈæn/) is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States 37 miles northeast of New York City. With a population of 20,732 for the 2010 census and a land area of just under 13 square miles, it is the smallest town on Connecticut's "Gold Coast". It also has the youngest population of any non-college town in Connecticut and has a high rate of marriage. Darien is one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S.; listed at #2 on CNN Money's list of "top-earning towns" in the United States as of 2010. Bloomberg's 2019 "America's 100 Richest Places" ranking placed Darien in the top 10, with an average household income of $341,090.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien,_Connecticut
So Darien is where they put the Costco:
https://www.storeopeninghours.com/costco-darien-ct
Across the street further towards Norwalk are Homegoods, Walmart, Stop-and-Shop, etc. Further into Darien, Trader Joes and Whole Foods.
The 6 figure crossovers are all parked at Costco and the Darien grocers.
It’s worth noting European sleep preferences are different than Americans, tending to prefer much firmer mattresses, so different testing results make sense.
I spend a lot of time on my mattress... might as well buy a nice one I really like (Stearns & Foster)
Because the mattress sellers in the bad part of town still charge 3x more.
Casper (or someone writing about them) once wrote a blog post about how they got into the mattress business because they saw unnecessarily huge margins and direct to consumer opportunity. Now they are opening physical stores and not even charging much differently from regular mattresses. I’m just going to keep buying cheap Chinese mattresses that don’t spend hundreds of dollars per purchase on advertising
The only Casper product I have is a dog bed and it's great.
The point is that the only reason Casper is “controversial” here is because IPOs have been elevated to a coveted version of success when it has nothing to do with anything aside from being unnecessarily rare.
Casper is just a vertically integrated mattress seller accessing the public markets now
I didn't remember it being that high, and checked Wayback and sure enough it was $850 in 2015, and $950 in 2017.
Given how many copycats are out there, many selling for much less, can someone help me understand how Casper gets away with selling a $1095 mattress + tax to a majority millennial crowd, who are supposedly cash strapped, and doing so successfully?