Today we're here to unbox my brand new Casper mattress.
Casper: The millennial's mattress.
Gone are the jingles
and the salespeople.
I'm going medieval on prices!
What a wank!
Everyone's had that experience of going into a mattress
store and being like, uh, this is not a place I want to be.
These days, sweet dreams are made of clever ads, celebrity
endorsements and a horde of mattress-crazed YouTubers.
Casper is resting comfortably valued at $1.1 billion,
and it's all thanks to the simple idea of selling
a mattress online.
We were all excited to go after
something super unsexy.
That's what partially created
such big growth in the beginning
is that we picked something that no one else our
age wanted to go work on.
That's Neil Parikh, one of the five founders behind the
direct-to-consumer mattress company, Casper.
The online mattress business is a crowded market now, with
competitors like Leesa, Purple, Tuft & Needle.
But when the Casper founders decided to disrupt the $14 billion
mattress industry back in 2014, they were met with
some pushback.
At the beginning,
we met with dozens of investors who all said, "No one's ever
going to buy a mattress online.
This is a dumb idea.
Don't do it."
We were just like racking up debt.
We put, like, $50,000 to $100,000 on our credit cards, which
probably was irresponsible, but we were all in.
The team set out to create an affordable foam
mattress in a box that consumers could buy online and have
shipped to their homes.
And they eventually got an investor onboard, one who had
experience investing in other direct-to-consumer businesses
like Warby Parker.
The Casper site launched in April 2014, and they sold out
of their inventory on the first day.
A truck was driving from Georgia that morning to New York
with our beds on it, and we were hoping that it was
going to get there in time.
And so when the truck got there, we literally, like, took
the boxes out, put them on the cobblestone streets,
relabeled them all and shipped them back out.
We set up a warehouse in the middle of the street,
and so it was chaos, but it was, it was awesome.
With first year sales projections
at $1.8 million,
they hit that in two months.
In 2018, Casper's revenue reached $400 million.
The company is valued at $1.1 billion,
and they've raised $340 million from Target,
Canada Goose and some famous investors.
The first celebrity investor we had was Nas the rapper, and
I just guessed the email address of his manager, and he ended up investing.
Another early celebrity investor was Ashton Kutcher.
And then it became like the cool brand for celebrities that want to sleep better.
But the real game changer?
Oh, my God.
When Kylie Jenner posted about Casper, I think it broke our website.
Casper became known for its subway ads - brain teasers,
puzzles and quirky illustrations.
But Parikh says the best marketing came from their customers
At the beginning, it was crazy.
We'd have this referral program where in the comments
section put down if a friend referred you to Casper, and
we'd just like Venmo you, you know, 75 bucks or
something. Like, it was very janky, but the thing went viral.
The unboxing videos are crazy.
There is a queen-sized mattress squeezed into this box.
Is this like a snake in a can, and as soon as I open it,
it just, ah!
You'd open it up, pull out the mattress, and a king-sized
bed would come out like one of those, like, dinosaur toys.
that you put in water.
I can hear it breathing.
The unboxing videos were ideal exposure for the brand,
says millennial marketing expert Jeff Fromm.
At the time and expense of the new Casper fan,
they're talking about this brand, and that's awesome.
Casper says it's not just a mattress company.
From high-tech night lights, to dog beds, it's all things sleep.
We spend a third of our lives sleeping, and so that's why
ever since we started Casper, we've been really focused on
what are all the things that people can be doing to help
you sleep better.
Casper's entrance was perfectly timed.
Self care, especially sleep, was having a bit of a moment.
Sleep deprivation, stress and burnout.
If you can sneak a power nap during your lunch break it will
actually boost your productivity.
Celebrities and business leaders started prioritizing sleep.
People are not just starting to think about how their body
is going to age, but now people are increasingly starting
to think about how their mind is aging.
And when you're looking for levers that you can pull on,
sleep may be one of those additional levers.
Something as simple as, you know, making sure you have a
mattress that fits, you know, your comfort and your style,
that ends up mattering as much as, you know, sleeping in a
dark room does.
Casper's success has spawned a king-sized list of rivals.
But it isn't made up of just startups.
Retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have launched their
own online-only mattress brands.
But Casper isn't sleeping on its competition.
In the beginning, everyone was dismissive of us: "No one's
ever going to buy a mattress online without trying it
first. People don't care about a brand in this space."
A lot of people weren't even sold on this idea that sleep
is going to be the next big health trend.
We want to win the mattress game, but long term to become
the Nike of sleep requires us to change the way everyone
thinks about the whole category.