Selling a Better Night's Sleep

Casper takes the pain out of buying a mattress.

- Liz Welch

BUYING A MATTRESS SUCKS. The salesmen talk fast, the choices (Tempur-Pedic? Visco-elastic memory foam? PrimaCool gel?) are overwhelming, and the prices are hefty. Yet everyone needs a mattress, meaning the $14 billion industry was ripe for reinventing. Enter Casper, the online bed-in-a-box maker that launched in April 2014. The concept was simple: Produce the best mattress possible at an affordable price, sell a single model, and deliver it quickly, for free, with a 100-day trial period. It worked: Casper had sales of $1 million in its first month. The New York City company has since raised $70 million in venture capital, grown to 120 employees, and hit $100 million in cumulative sales. Co-founder and COO Neil Parikh tells Inc. about solving the problem of friction beneath the sheets.

Reinventing Sleep

In the beginning, it was “Let’s disrupt the mattress industry. It’s broken.” That quickly morphed into “Let’s invent an industry around sleep.” My father is a sleep doctor, and I went to a year of medical school. The mattress industry  a racket. You walk into a store expecting a confusing experience, but you don’t expect the 35 models offered to be basically the same product with different labels. It’s worse than buying a used car—at least there you have data points like horsepower, air conditioning, and a Carfax report. But who knows how many springs are good for you?