Casper sued a mattress review site, Sleepopolis, for writing negative reviews of their products. Casper then settled the lawsuit by taking over Sleepopolis. The site now posts only positive reviews of Casper's mattresses.
Thanks for pointing that one out! I had no idea. I was literally less than a week from purchasing two Casper mattresses - one for my family one for my parents. I bailed. I also told my sister to return hers since she's still in the refund window. She told me it wasn't nearly as comfortable as she thought but they gave her hard time with refund. They asked her to either pay return fees which are north of $300 or find non profit that would accept. I'm taking matters in my hand. Its sad.
Not to get too meta but undermining reviews is also a tactic used by companies to manipulate sales because if you don’t trust any reviews but still have to make a decision you’re going to go with a “safe” “established” brand which usually means whoever has the most mindshare.
I see how that argument would work for Sealy, Simmons and Serta. I don't see how this would work for Casper or any of the other no-name mattress-in-a-box company.
For younger people who want easy choices I have 100% seen this lead people to default to Casper. I send around the article on their practices regularly due to this, and buy my mattresses off Wayfair mostly based on price and basic sanity checking.
Right now I have an incredible 14 inches of Queen memory foam I got for $400 that's incredible to sleep on. The brand? A no name.
What I've taken away from the mattress craziness is that if you exclude the fancy things like temperature adjustment and sleep number stuff, most basic mattresses come down to basic material and then secondly firmness. As long as you get those two things right they kinda all seem to be the same.
Consumer Reports is non-profit and purchases all of the products it tests. Its revenue comes from subscriptions and grants/donations, not advertising or commissions.
Mattress/politics is really shady. Purple tried to sue this YouTube blogger that was complaining about the mysterious "secret formula" powder that Purple used prevent the plastic sticking. I ended up getting a Leesa since it was the most reputable and haven't done anything shitty.
The backstory here is a bit more complex. The "powder" is entirely safe and the blogger was spreading disinformation while also running an incentive/referral site of their own while being connected to a competitor (GhostBed). Whoops.
Mattresses are so notoriously shady that one popular new brand in Germany is literally marketed as the "anti-cartel mattress". Of course, the top Amazon reviews are full of people calling it a scam. (I have one and it's, well, tolerable.)
Just wanted to say that working with Casper customer service was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had.
I bought their top of the line hybrid mattress then a few weeks later they had a sale which could be used on any of their products if you bought a mattress. We really wanted the lamps so we contacted customer service to see if it was possible to get the discount since we just bought the mattress. The girl was extremely rude making it seem like I was wasting her time. She told me that there was no way to add anything to an existing order so I couldn’t do it. I asked if I had to return the mattress and reorder it to get the lamps and she said yes that’s what I would have to do but no I was out of luck because they took too long to respond to me (called after they didn’t respond to any of my messages) so the promotion was over. The whole time she just seemed annoyed that I even tried to ask.
Sorry I spent $2000 on a mattress and wanted to spend more on another product. I just returned it and got a Novosbed for half the price and it was way better so I’m pretty glad it turned out that way. Keep in mind that Casper can’t sell a return so they have to donate it. The whole return was a mess to deal with as well. Glad they lost money on the return even if they get to write some of the donation off.
Guess my point is that I don’t think Casper treats their customers well. I wouldn’t touch them as an investment. I personally think they’re just cashing out at this point.
Do you keep track of all the things you buy in case price goes down so that you can complain to customer support when they do?
In my case, I contacted support to see if I could get a discount before making the purchase and they told me to wait two weeks for an upcoming promotion. Also quickly exchanged a defect mattress.
Not saying they're the best, but complaining because they don't have retroactive sales....
I don’t see how this is a horrible service experience. There is no expectation of a company to honor future discounts. Would you return a car if its price later dropped or if they suddenly had a better deal?
That has nothing to do with it. The problem with the customer service is not them not honouring future discounts.
It was them not being good customer service, the general rule in customer service is basically try and do what ever the customer wants. In this case they wanted a coupon (probably for 10-20% off extremely expensive lamps) after buying a $2000 mattress. This doesn't matter and should have been given immediately.
The positive review of a single person is more important then losing 10-20% on a sale after a user already purchased another product.
Due to them not giving them a 10-20% coupon they lost a $2000 mattress sale and got a bad review on a site.
The problem is the customer agreeing that they want to buy something for a given price. Then a little while later they see an opportunity to get something for free so expect customer service to bend over backwards to make them a happier customer. They were already happy with their purchase, they just want to be happy.
It is bogus "customer is always right" garbage, and incredibly entitled behavior.
It wasn’t free. It was 10% off another product while we still had most of our return time available. A customer should not have to return your product to receive a discount a week after. It’s a massive inconvenience on both sides that could be avoided just by honoring the discount.
I haven't been in the market for a mattress for awhile now but went on Casper's website and was shocked to see the price for a Queen is now $1095.
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?
I'm guessing market dominance from years of targeted advertising on podcasts as well as buying/bullying mattress reviewer websites to make sure they stay as the highest rated.
It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress. You might buy 1 per decade, people forget what the experience or price was like. I spent a lot of time researching then gave up and went to a "mattress outlet" laid on a few, then got one for around $400. I sleep fine, probably better than I ever have.
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
$1100+tax is more than double what you'd pay at Ikea, Amazon, Costco, etc.
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.
Started-up with principles. Got big. Reverted to the beancounter corporate mean. Now charging what the market will bear. Opportunity now open for new startup with principles. Rinse and repeat.
> 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...
The gross margin of manufactured consumer goods with lots of competition isn't usually 50٪. But you're right marketing is needed to maintain it. I'm stunned by the high general and administrative costs.
There are plenty of 12 inch memory foam mattresses on Amazon that are in the $300-$400 range for a Queen size, including shipping. I'm happy with the "Zinus" brand.
I bought a cheap Amazon matress (~200 or so) for a guest-room bed. That bed ended up becoming our primary bed and within a year it developed a noticable softspot + indentation where I sleep (my wife's side is fine, I'm a side sleeper, she's half my weight and sleeps on her back mostly). We rotated it and it was good for another 6 months before the same thing happened.
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 the past 5 years I have owned a Casper at $850, a tuft and needle for $750, and something by Ashley for $350. I think I like the Ashley slightly better but they are virtually indistinguishable. I second the recommendation to go cheap.
I've had a lot of negative things to say about Amazon for the past couple of years, but yeah, you shouldn't be paying much more than $300 for a mattress. Everything on top of that is your customer acquisition cost, which should be in your bank account, not Google/Facebook's.
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.
not sure why that matters even if it's true their marketing costs are high. if it ends up costing significantly more then what value are you providing me as a customer for selling something that is 2x more than what I can get anywhere?
About 5 years ago I bought a $400 mattress on Amazon. Came in shrink wrap and has been in my bed since then. It has been perfect in every way. I don't understand why anyone would spend more than twice that amount.
> It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress.
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 such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not. It’s not like when you’re buying food and you always buy bananas for $1 and you stop to grab a few items at somewhere new & bananas are $2 so you don’t buy them cause you have a baseline.
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.
> It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not.
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.
Shopped for a mattress with my wife. Tried pretty much everything in the store. her favorite was a firm no-frills no topper low end "brand" name mattress (one of the big 3). Was nice to get something delivered for $600ish in a california king. I was more-or-less prepared to spend whatever it took to get something we both liked. That was easy.
I think a lot of it is whether you consider the price (whatever it is) to be reasonable. I am willing to spend $1000 on something I spend literally half my life on top of.
foam mattresses at Costco, Amazon, Ikea, etc. are under $500, so this is more than double for something that is not clearly 2x better than comparable products
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.
I had to buy a mattress last year and did a pretty deep dive into the world of mattresses. What I learned is that there's no meaningful research on what's "best", and sleep experts say that it's 100% personal preference (and 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.
For the same reason that you can spend from tens to thousands of dollars on many kitchen appliances, clothes, etc.: branding, appearance, and perceived (although sometimes real) correlation between price and quality. There are additional factors as such a list is bound to be non-exhaustive, but I feel that covers a number of main factors.
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.
It is important. Given how much time you spend sleeping and people complain about spending $1000. But they don’t complain about a $30000 car they spend less than half the time in.
The same or very similar mattresses are rebranded and resold as vastly different price points. Mattress sales is mostly marketing. When I was researching mattresses years ago the takeaway was basically price and satisfaction/quality of sleep are not correlated very much.
This is preying on "wellness" concerns. Casper convinces you that a problem exists where it previously (probably) did not, that your sleep is suboptimal, and that only they can fix it for you. Prehistory, humans slept on beds of grasses or reeds on the ground. I still think 80% of your sleep quality is determined by what you do in the day: caffeine intake, amount of physical activity, overall stress level.
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.
Casper caters to stress, ripoff anxiety, social anxiety, and budget.
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.
Same and it was a fantastic deal. Even without the holiday discount, Costco sells it for $599 which is close to 50% discount on Casper's $1095 price. They brand it as 'Casper Select', but it's essentially same as the the original.
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!
>The market for a $1,095 mattress wouldn't be caught dead shopping at CostCo, even if it's the exact same mattress.
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.
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.”
Brand appeal I suppose. I remember 1/2 the Casper price tag goes to marketing - I just bought a generic Amazon Zinus for 1/2 the price that research suggested came from the same foam factory. Seems like Zinus has gone down in cost in the last few years as one would expect with economy of scale while Casper has gone up one, $250 now from Amazon shipped, 1/4 of Casper. Simultaneously feels like Casper has cut back on marketing. Also Zinus is a 40 year old Korean company that's been doing bedding for for 15 years compared to Casper, a tech company that's been around for 5. It seems like a no brainer decision for anyone doing rudimentary research.
I have a Zinus I paid like $250 at most on it and it's the best mattress I've ever slept on. But, I ordered one for the guest room and it did not fully expand, so I talked with Amazon and they sent me another one. I took the first one apart, it's pretty simple set of I vaguely remember 4 layers of different foam types. Making these mattresses is pretty simple for all the brands, so the profit margin on an expensive name brand is very high. All you need is a good vacuum and decent packaging for the foam types. I have no idea why anyone would pay $1000-$3000 for a mattress.
I guess its because many people think that they need to sleep well in this hectic times and cannot allow themselves tu cut cost on a mattress. Expensive = good quality. Turns out this is nonsense - we have a foundation in germany that does independend product tests for all varieties of things and came to the conclusion that the best mattress they ever tested was some 200€ mattress.
We have the same in the US (consumer reports) and the Casper hybrid mattress currently has the 2nd highest rating. Expensive is not necessarily better, but it is often correlated.
It’s worth noting European sleep preferences are different than Americans, tending to prefer much firmer mattresses, so different testing results make sense.
That’s pretty interesting, why do you think Europeans have different preferences. I guess I (maybe naively) assumed that the distribution of preference would be the same for all countries.
Maybe they don't buy Casper? I am not cash strapped but shopped around a little bit and got a (very satisfying) queen size mattress for $600 last year @ Living Spaces.
> 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?
Because the mattress sellers in the bad part of town still charge 3x more.
I got a great mattress from an outlet, queen size for about $400. I was blown away thinking that Casper was going to be cheaper. They just have good marketing I think
I got my favorite mattress ever from Amazon and it cost like $350 for a (firm) queen foam mattress, box spring, and frame.
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
I got Costco's house brand memory foam mattress for that when it was on sale. Best mattress I've ever owned. (And I probably wouldn't have it if I hadn't tested out a memory foam mattress at a Casper store, in a bit of irony.)
and people also dont need to go to the artisanal grocery store for food, doesnt mean there isnt a market
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 bought a latex mattress several years ago, and will never buy another mattress. (Literally, they last 50+ years) Feels great, available in a range of firmness, no weird smells, never deforms, doesn't get hot, and naturally insect/mold resistant. I think I paid 1300 USD for a king size.
I know that's only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand, I'm just mentioning this since I had trouble finding much info on them. Latex is not promoted or advertised much, since they have very low markup compared to other mattresses; the store would much rather sell you a "hybrid" (usually 1/2 latex and 1/2 memory foam). But if you want to pay 2x as much to get something that lasts 4x as long, what you want is simple, boring, 100% natural latex.
This is probably my most confusing slew of downvotes. What do you think, I own a plantation of rubber trees? I thought it was surprising and interesting that something invented ~100 years ago would be an optimal choice in a thriving market full of recent patents. Ah well.
While we love our natural latex (from flobeds.com, no affiliation!) bed, it doesn't last forever. We had to replace ours at 15 years - while it was still better off than a spring mattress, it still had become worn. It had valleys and clumps - basically the latex was somewhat broken down. Compared to the new mattress, the old was more brittle and would tear easy, while the new one was resilient and springy.
The difference between it and normal spring mattresses is amazing though. I highly recommend them!
I really like our SleepOnLatex mattresses (https://sleeponlatex.com). They're yet another mattress-in-a-box company, and the name is kind of bad, but the mattresses are very high quality AFAICT - UL Greenguard Gold/Oekotex certified for low emissions, organic wool covers rather than chemical retardants to meet fire standards. And they're extremely reasonably priced to boot ($800 for a queen).
No affiliation, just a very happy customer. Never tested their customer service/returns/etc, so I don't know how good they are there.
I don't know the brand, I got it from a local mattress store in town and it wasn't branded beyond the name of the store (not a chain). But neither was it made locally, I think they're mostly made in SE Asia. I assume there must be online retailers but can't recommend one, sorry.
Many engineers focus on sales and marketing all the time as a normal course of jobs that involve product management. Many engineers already take into account sales and marketing perspectives in very effective ways, especially quantitative ways that are underused by employees whose sole jobs are exclusively in sales or marketing.
It’s very tiring to see engineers be tacitly assumed to need remedial time in other fields to gain sufficient appreciation for them, especially when the reciprocal deficiency of experience in engineering is virtually never raised for sales, marketing, etc. while engineers often do self-learn quite effective product and business skills.
The trick is that there are a bunch of mattress companies on Amazon selling really cheap foam mattresses (~200$) that are basically the same as Casper. But Casper jammed a ton of money into branding and marketing, so probably has great margins on their products. Foam mattresses as a product are getting extremely cheap and the quality is really not bad. I have a cheap one and honestly like sleeping on it more than 1200$ spring bed I had.
"“Barriers to entry are low, but barriers to profitability are high,” he said. “It doesn’t take that much to design a mattress, a marketing campaign, put up a website, and have one of these big companies like Carpenter do the fulfillment for you,”"
The majority of bed-in-a-boxes outsource their manufacturing...They’re literally calling around to producers saying, ‘we need a finished product and here’s what we think it should look like.’ Sometimes, they don’t even know what they want it to look like...Most of the outsourcing is to just four major manufacturers
I've had others staying in our guest bedroom love it too and go out and buy one. At this point, with a number of moves and growing family, I've bought something like 5-6 of them.
I think Costco sells the same mattress under Novaflex or a similar name but at a slightly higher price point (the Amazon price varies quite a bit on the Sleep Innovations mattresses -- check CamelCamelCamel on it if curious).
I've moved a lot in the past few years, and each time buy a new mattress. Each time I've bought on Amazon, and to be honest, never had one I hated. Brooklyn Bedding, Zinus, etc. My favorite so far I took a complete gamble on and didn't expect much, but wow was I impressed. I have only had it 6 months so can't speak to its longetivity, but I sleep like a baby. It's a 'Revel' brand, here https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07CZWQ97P/
My kid sleeps on one, while I sleep on a Casper, so I can compare side by side. They're more or less the same thing for all intents and purposes, except Zinus is 1/4th the price.
Great business story. They quickly capitalized on a trend (tuft and needle started 2 years before), pumped it up with great marketing and distribution, and now are making their exit before a recession.
Interesting that they want to explore medical devices, “sleep services”, and sleep supplements. Guess they are marketing themselves as the Amazon of sleep? Because right now all I know about them is that they sell overpriced mattresses
Though my initial response to the title was to laugh, upon further thought I think they're actually making a smart play here.
They're essentially betting on "optimizing wellness" being a huge fad this decade, which I believe many others are predicting, and are using their current position to get more cash to get ahead of that.
I don't associate Casper with "a quality night of sleep", probably because I'm happy with my current mattress and have no need of their product, but at the same time I couldn't name a single one of the current applications that exist to track + "optimize" sleep / circadian cycles, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that, so who knows? Maybe in 2030 we'll all be moaning about Casper putting up their Nighty Night subscription another $7 for "HD dreams" and reluctantly acquiescing to it.
We tried the memory-foam-in-a-box mattresses and they were not good (leesa - I suspect Casper is similar.). We just ordered and received a latex mattress from Arizona (https://www.mattresses.net) and it's so much better. I don't work for or have any affiliation with them, I just hope this helps someone else.
I've been using 2 of them now for well over a year and they've been excellent. I fall asleep with them every night. It's a well engineered product. The only minor criticism I could give is the dimming functionality by spinning while in the charging platform could work a little better.
100 nights or your money back. After two days we didn’t like the mattress. Emailed support and told them we weren’t happy with it. The next day 1800 Junk truck came out and trashed the mattress. So essentially their returned mattresses go into the landfill and become waste if you’re not happy with it.
Maybe they don't want a bedbug invasion in their warehouse.
I bought a cushion for my desk chair from Amazon and it turned out to be garbage so I tried to return it. They said they could only give me a refund if I sent them a picture of the cut up cushion. I didn't have to send it back, just send a picture of it with a big gash down the middle.
I guess, at least with 1800 Junk there is a good chance a employee will pluck the mattress out and put it up on Craigslist.
It seems that they already saturated their Direct to Consumer channel and all their growth is now dependent on their wholesale efforts. It seems risky to me, especially with a slow-cycle business like mattresses. Also what happens if retailers create their own premium brands and/or secure exclusivity deals with other manufacturers?
those are great (fantastic?) margins but i don't understand why they're not higher? there are so many memory foam mattresses on amazon that are exactly the same thing (maybe slightly shallower "soft foam" that run for e.g. ~300 for a queen that are themselves probably making great margins.
I have a Casper and I tend to sweat a lot at night so I was looking for a more premium mattress with better ventilation. When I've spent the night with "friends" who have cheaper foam mattresses, I often wake up drenched in sweat.
it has very little to do with mattress, hot air from your body tends to behave as psychics would dictate and will go through your blanket upwards, or whatever you sleep under. Most reasons for sweating is your AC blowing cold air at you at night when you sleep. When your head is cold the body raises temperature and hence you sweat under blanket.
Last thing to change would be another grand on new mattress.
The product I like from Casper isn’t their mattress – It’s their lights. They’re god damn incredible, I sleep peacefully thanks to those. They should just focus on stuff like that.
I bought a Casper off shelf two days ago. It was the only one on the shelf in Target and it was 9.45 PM. It was pricier than I had expected and didn’t understand why it was so expensive. But I needed one pronto and it wasn’t worth my time to go looking for something else that late at night.
> "Casper is a very inefficient wealth transfer from venture capitalists to prestige podcast makers"
___[Big Well Known Consumer Products Company]___ is a very inefficient wealth transfer from ___[Blue Chip Stock Investors]___ to prestige ___[Traditional Media Companies]___
When I was 23 and doing startups full time, I slept on a hardwood floor with just a blanket and a pillow. Helped me to get up in the morning and do work, did nothing bad for my body as far as I can tell.
That's ridiculous that you were down voted. My brother slept on a rock hard bed as a kid and is able to sleep on the floor, without a pillow, all night no problem. The soft bed thing is more of a cultural issue than a biological necessity.
Anyone who has ever been to bootcamp can tell you that it really doesn't matter where you sleep if you're REALLY tired. I would sleep on the ground if they let me. I would fall asleep sitting down, then stand up and fall asleep again. And when I did finally go back to my tent to sleep on my 50 year old army bed in a used sleeping bag, it was the best sleep I ever had.
Unsolicited advice: buy the cheapest mattress (that doesn't squeal) that you can find and slap a $50 memory foam topper on top of it. That maxes out my comfort level.
I did an insane amount of research when buying my mattress a couple years back, there are _so_ many bed-in-a-box companies now. Decided on Helix Sleep because they offer a level of customisation, and their customer support is rated incredibly highly (which I decided very important if you're going to buy a mattress without trying it).
I love my Helix so much so that I convinced my parents to buy one. They didn't love theirs and sure enough, customer service was hassle-free with the return. So my n=2 recommendation: Helix is the way to go
That said those Glow Lights do seem pretty awesome
I didn't mention whether I thought the increase in IPOs was worrying. (In fact, I do think we may be reaching/reached saturation.) IPOs per year is a highly volatile number [1], based upon lots of factors, such as perceived market conditions (sometimes by the underwriters, not the company IPO'ing). [2]
I'm all for having more IPO's (my job is actually advocating for policies that make it easier/cheaper for companies to go public) - but maybe this isn't the best comparison to make: "While this [# of IPOs in 2019] was an increase from the past few years, it was half the number of twenty years ago, while the Dot Com Bubble was forming."
I'm not totally sure what 'this' is referencing, but if its the feeling that there are too many IPOs -- I see it as a good thing!
It's so hard to find investments where a company hasn't hit their biggest growth period yet. It feels like you need to be in some inner circle of investors to get in on some of that action.
I probably wouldn't invest in Casper, but I hope the number of IPOs keeps increasing!
https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
I would take any reviews of Casper's products with a grain of salt.