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.
HN from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321807
"Casper went to war with popular mattress review site, then financed its takeover"