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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 rem

• rolltiide 7y ago
  > 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.
  • blackearl 7y ago
    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
    • criddell 7y ago
      A memory foam mattress for $400? That's a very good deal. The only Casper product I have is a dog bed and it's great.
      • cwyers 7y ago
        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.)
      • blackearl 7y ago
        Not foam, it's some hybrid spring thing. There's so much crap out there it's hard to know what's real and what's BS
    • opportune 7y ago
      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
  • ivalm 7y ago
    Go to Costco, Living Spaces, or a myriad of other non-seedy stores and get a mattress for half the price.
    • rolltiide 7y ago
      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
      • ivalm 7y ago
        I replied to > Because the mattress sellers in the bad part of town still charge 3x more [than casper]. Which is not true. I understand there are premium choices, but this was not what I was replying to.
• gooseus 7y ago
  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. HN from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321807 "Casper went to war with popular mattress review site, then financed its takeover"
  • tempsy 7y ago
    so even people who are cash strapped are willing to overpay for a commodity item if they perceive it to be the best in a certain price range...? 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...
    • blackearl 7y ago
      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
      • tempsy 7y ago
        $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.
        • Paperweight 7y ago
          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.
• chris_engel 7y ago
  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.
  • topkai22 7y ago
    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.
    • smabie 7y ago
      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.
• dirtyid 7y ago
  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.
  • seesaw 7y ago
    I got two Zinus mattresses from Amazon for about $400 total. It has been only two months, but I have been happy so far.
    • coldcode 7y ago
      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.
• dawnerd 7y ago
  Costco just had them for 480 bucks. I picked one up, so far it's been worth it.
  • ra7 7y ago
    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.
    • braythwayt 7y ago
      It's price discrimination. 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!
      • tempsy 7y ago
        what? 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.
      • cmdshiftf4 7y ago
        >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. Plus Zuckerberg shops there. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/photo-facebook-billionaire-mark-zuckerberg-at-costco.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/photo-facebook-billionaire-m...
• meddlepal 7y ago
  I just spent 1600+ on a (really nice) new queen. I spend a lot of time on my mattress... might as well buy a nice one I really like (Stearns & Foster)
• starpilot 7y ago
  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.
• astura 7y ago
  Advertising/marketing. 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.
  • Lotus123 7y ago
    http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mattress-store-bubble/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mattress-store-bubble/
  • xchaotic 7y ago
    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.
    • astura 7y ago
      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.
• rconti 7y ago
  And they're disrupting sleep by advertising on podcasts and cutting out middlemen and... now opening stores. eyeroll
• ivalm 7y ago
  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.
• discardable_dan 7y ago
  I bought a queen at Costco this year for $599.
• master-litty 7y ago
  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.