đ One Perfect Mattress for Everyone: 6 Lessons from Casperâs Success
May 27, 2019 ⢠5 min ⢠Business
Casper Sleep has seemingly pressed all the right buttons over the course of its journey. Founded in 2014, the mattress startup has won over customers with its innovative âbed-in-a-boxâ model. Many other players have tried to emulate this approach, but none have had quite the same degree of success as Casper.
In this post, weâll dive into the lessons that I took from studying Casperâs rise to the top, citing from the HBS case study, Casper Sleep: Marketing the âOne Perfect Mattress for Everyone.â You can purchase the study here for a reasonable price if youâre interested in reading the whole thing.
Steal like an entrepreneur
The idea for Casper didnât come to be as a âEureka!â moment in the shower one morning. The idea of disrupting traditional industries by moving to a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model wasnât novel. It was spring 2013, and Warby Parker was already making headlines by doing it in eyewear.
The founding members of Casper all admired Warby Parkerâs success delivering on the promise of âdesigner eyewear at revolutionary prices.â It was no secret that the mattress industry was prime for disruptionâââclearly, somebody was going to be the Warby Parker of Mattresses. So they built out a team and got to work.
The best businesses often arenât born from great ideas, but rather from taking someone elseâs idea, exploring it, tweaking it, and finally molding it into what they want it to be. Very few things in this world are truly original. Your idea probably isnât either, and thatâs okay. Neither was Casper.
Have a great story to tell
Customers love a good story. Casper wasnât just trying to manufacture and sell mattresses, they were and still are trying to help people âsleep their way into better livesââââthis is a pretty compelling story. Much more compelling than the âwe want to sell you a new mattressâ story that other brands settle for.
This point is outlined in the TED talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action from the unmissable Simon Sinek linked above. Sinek makes the point that great leaders inspire action by honing in on the âwhyâ rather than the âhowâ or âwhatâ instead.
Companies follow this rule as well. Most customers donât perform a thorough analysis of specs, functionality, and value offering. They buy based on the story you tell. Whether you like it or not, your âwhyâ matters.
Build brand love
The act of building brand love might not show up in your short-term performance, but it turns out to be invaluable later on. These are the customers that will stick with you over time. Theyâll engage, evangelize, and come back for more over and over again. The quote below says it all:
âThe key for us is a Casper personality and story that builds an emotional bond with the consumer. If someone buys a Casper because they see us as offering the lowest price per cubic foot of quality foam and offer free deliveryâââthat generates some margin for us on the sale. But, there is nothing there we can build a future on. There is no reason for that person to buy another mattress from us; no reason to buy our pillows and sheets. We need that foundational emotion. Itâs all about brand love.ââââLuke Sherwin, Casper Chief Creative Officer
Challenge assumptions
When Casper was first starting out, the team generally thought that they would need 2â3 firmness levels to satisfy the market. Why wouldnât they? Everyone else was doing it this way. The âone-size-fits-allâ approach had no place in the mattress business, or did it?
Eventually, Casper decided to challenge this assumption by running several experiments on various prototypes, even going as far as creating a mattress with the left and right halves offering different firmness. After some time, the data lead them to the answer: One level of firmness was best. It satisfied customers and lead to no complex decision making on their part, alleviated manufacturing chaos, had numerous marketing benefits and gave them yet another edge over competitors.
Donât overlook customer service
Instead of deeming customer service less important than other product-related features and projects, the Casper team placed an emphasis on customer service early on. They made sure that site visitors were encouraged to call the Casper Customer Experience team. The following quote was taken from the Casper website, in the early days:
âWeâre happy to give you advice on your bed, chat about sleep in general, or even read you a bedtime storyâ
Furthermore, the customer service team or âsleep specialistsâ werenât evaluated on something like the number of calls they took in an hour. Instead, they were actually encouraged to stay on the phone with customers, citing things like Net Promoter Score (NPS) as the evaluation metric of choice.
Thereâs no finish line
Even after Casper was deemed successful in 2016, the company was facing a problem. Philip Kim, Casper CEO, noted that the company had a continued âawarenessâ problem. He elaborated, saying that âthe reality that we face is that a vast majority of people donât know that we exist.â
In response, Casper has continued to innovate and move further into the âofflineâ retail space with pop-up shops and a giant partnership with Target. Even after coming all this way, the work wasnât done. In fact, it was and still is just getting started. There will always be problems to solve and fires to put out. There truly is no finish line, thatâs what makes it so exciting, isnât it?
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