- Mattress startup Casper has opened its first permanent store in New York.
- The store is designed to be a testing ground for the company to trial new products and see how customers interact with them.
- Casper is a digitally native brand that launched in 2014. The company's total revenue since inception reached more than $600 million in 2017, and it counts Target and 50 Cent among its investors.
Casper wants to create the Disneyland of mattress shopping.
Since launching online in 2014, mattress startup Casper has become one of the biggest disruptors in the industry. Customers can order the product online, trial it for 100 days, and return it if they don't like it.
In the past few years, the company has grown rapidly – total sales reached more than $600 million in 2017, and it has diversified from its core product, the mattress, to sell all things sleep-related, from sheets and pillowcases to dog beds and calming tea.
It has also expanded its mattress range to offer more pieces — a queen-sized mattress, for example, can cost from $600 for a standard mattress up to $1,850 for a more technical piece.
50 Cent is an investor, as is Target, which now stocks Casper products in more than 1,000 of its stores across the US.
After running a series of pop-ups around the country, Casper opened its first permanent store in New York on Tuesday. The digital retailer is looking to get into the brick-and-mortar game as legacy stores such as Mattress Firm succumb to the pressures of the retail apocalypse, scale back, and shutter stores. But Casper says it has a strategy to make it work.
"It's all about creating an amazing experience. It will be a zero-pressure environment with no commission sales people," cofounder and chief operating officer Neil Parikh told Business Insider.
We visited the new store to see what it's like:
The new store is located in Manhattan's Noho area, on the popular shopping street Broadway. It's taken the design team a year to create the concept and just over a week to get it up and running. When we visited, parts of the store were still under construction.
Casper wants to eliminate the mindset that shopping for a mattress has to be a dreary experience by creating an engaging space where customers can trial products and have fun. There are no salespeople working on commission. "It's really meant to be the antithesis of a traditional mattress retailer," Emma Frane, communications director at Casper, told Business Insider.
"We want to create places that are fun and exciting. More like the Apple stores and less like a traditional mattress store, where you're like, 'Ugh, I have to go take a shower after I've been inside,'" Parikh said.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider