CASPER FOR MAKING MONEY IN OUR SLEEP
Last summer, Casper—the New York–based mattress company that aims, as its founders say, to become the Nike of sleep—introduced a surprising new product. It was only Casper’s fourth major launch, after its high-tech foam mattress (which debuted in 2014) and extra-breathable sheets and pillow (2015), but it differed from those products in a major way. This one, it turned out, wasn’t meant for humans. The Casper Dog Mattress, which sells for $125, promises “to create a sleep environment that caters to canines’ natural behaviors.” An R&D team spent 11 months conducting dog sleep studies, consulting with canine psychologists and churning through more than 100 prototypes. “Which is a crazy idea,” admits Neil Parikh, one of Casper’s five cofounders and its COO. “It’s a dog bed!” The mattress (“Designed for top dogs, by top dogs”) is selling briskly. But that’s only part of the value. As Parikh puts it, it’s an opportunity “to [show] people how we think—to remind them that, ‘Hey, here is a cool group of people that thinks in an interesting way.’ ” If you’re going to convince consumers that sleep is a pursuit as worthy of obsession as exercise or eating, you have to approach things differently. Three years after launching the original one-model-sleeps-all bed-in-a-box, Casper is combining science, design thinking, branding, and a winking sense of humor to redefine the humble mattress and its accoutrements into lifestyle statements. And its hundreds of thousands of customers are proving that being well rested is finally getting its due. The company, which pulled in an estimated $200 million–plus in 2016 revenue (double the previous year’s), has begun expanding internationally, entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the U.K., with more countries soon to follow. “We’ve set up the infrastructure so within a couple months we can turn on a new geography,” says Parikh. “We’ve
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