Casper

“You know, even, even at this point in time, you asked most people, and we did this survey work before we started Casper, was what kind of bed do you sleep on? Almost no one could recall it, and if you could recall it was usually either Ikea or Tempur-Pedic”

“At one point, private investors valued the brand at over a billion dollars. But since its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, Casper's market value has dropped by half.”

“When we started looking at sources of traffic to our website, we started seeing a ton of traffic come from YouTube in our early days, and it ended up that the Casper unboxing experience was something that people love to film on their phone and love to post onl…”

“We did a million dollars in our first 28 days.”

“40 mattresses is, like, 30,000 dollars worth of business. I mean, again, that, that was, like, what we were forecasting to do in month Six or seven and we did it in our first day.”

“We still have a high margin business, and it's a high margin category so, you know, you look today, we're north of a 50% gross profit margin Business, which is, is good and strong, and that's enough to build a defensible business.”

“It did, and it was way bigger of an onslaught of competition than, I think, certainly I could have ever imagined, and I think this is one of the things, looking back, that, you know, was a mistake on my part. I was kind of dismissive of competition in the earl…”

“There are some companies and some sites out there, especially at the time when we were litigating against this, that did not represent themselves as being paid by these advertisers, and they represented themselves as independent and unbiased, and that just was…”

“And then the nice thing about the model which was, It's true also for Casper when we started it is just a, it's a negative cash conversion, which is a fancy way of saying customers give you the money to buy the goods before you have to put the money out. So it…”

“Amazon canceled our account because they thought we were reselling them, which we weren't, but we were buying hundreds of these arrow beds just to help people sleep.”

“To my knowledge, we were the first to ever brand the unboxing experience, and so we put the stripes on the box on the exterior, and we put a tray on the interior.”

“And we said, if they want to make an investment and take a, you know, minority position in Casper, and if they want to help us More importantly than the investment, if they want to help us commercially, and the investment will help catalyze that, then great. T…”

“We were the first, I think, visible high profile company to go public post WeWork, which meant there was a ton of negative sentiment around companies that were investing capital into their business and around, you know, these, the startup And side of things.”

“The folks like Calm and Headspace have gone on to build great businesses, and I think the killer application for those businesses is not meditation. I think it's sleep”

“They wanted to buy this site, and we talked to them about financing that acquisition so that they could operate it, and they had complete, independent editorial control, and they ran their business. We were just a financing partner for them.”

“You know, we actually really didn't feel pressure from investors... It was really, I think, more self-imposed pressure to get public than anything.”

“You know, I think the proliferation of mattress startups certainly got very competitive very quickly, and immediately buying a mattress online became even more overwhelming and confusing than buying a mattress offline.”