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

$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.

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.

> Seems like all that's happened is they just keep fat margins for themselves.

Judging by their S-1, not so much... They're offering up $100M in shares on $200M of assets and $300M in debt. They spend about as much on marketing as they make from selling the goods, leaving shareholders to pay for all of the administration expenses. If it were a tech company it'd be easy to say this is another debt-fueled startup looking for an exit...

The gross margin of manufactured consumer goods with lots of competition isn't usually 50٪. But you're right marketing is needed to maintain it. I'm stunned by the high general and administrative costs.

There are plenty of 12 inch memory foam mattresses on Amazon that are in the $300-$400 range for a Queen size, including shipping. I'm happy with the "Zinus" brand.

I bought a cheap Amazon matress (~200 or so) for a guest-room bed. That bed ended up becoming our primary bed and within a year it developed a noticable softspot + indentation where I sleep (my wife's side is fine, I'm a side sleeper, she's half my weight and sleeps on her back mostly). We rotated it and it was good for another 6 months before the same thing happened.

In contrast, our 4 year old Leesa mattress (which we're back on as a primary bed) is fine.

I'm sure that I overpaid with the $900 Leesa, but I don't know how to be sure I'll get a durable mattress if I get a cheap one.

In the past 5 years I have owned a Casper at $850, a tuft and needle for $750, and something by Ashley for $350. I think I like the Ashley slightly better but they are virtually indistinguishable. I second the recommendation to go cheap.

I've had a lot of negative things to say about Amazon for the past couple of years, but yeah, you shouldn't be paying much more than $300 for a mattress. Everything on top of that is your customer acquisition cost, which should be in your bank account, not Google/Facebook's.

In my experience you can just optimize the firmness to your liking with a pad. If suddenly its too firm or too soft, you can switch it out and not have to replace a whole mattress. Relatives visited and wet the bed? Throw it out and get a new one, your only out a few hundred dollars instead of $1000+.

For couples who want their mattress different ways, that is another market.

Could you provide a link to an example of the kind of "pad" you're talking about? We are mattress-shopping now, so this is a timely discussion :)

added cost of marketing though?

not sure why that matters even if it's true their marketing costs are high. if it ends up costing significantly more then what value are you providing me as a customer for selling something that is 2x more than what I can get anywhere?

The marketing provides value by convincing you that you found a quality product in an opaque industry.

About 5 years ago I bought a $400 mattress on Amazon. Came in shrink wrap and has been in my bed since then. It has been perfect in every way. I don't understand why anyone would spend more than twice that amount.

> It's really hard to know what's a good price for a mattress.

I don't understand this at all. You can Google and have all the prices right at hand, so comparison shopping by number isn't hard.

You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like - is the pillow top or foam too soft? Do the coils poke too hard? Too firm? Too heavy for you to move when you need to do the sheets? - You admitted to doing this yourself.

I could never see myself buying a mattress from a company like Casper personally. Returning something like a mattress because you don't like it has got to be a level of hassle that I can't even begin to imagine being worth it, vs just making sure you bought one that you're comfortable with in the first place.

> so comparison shopping by number isn't hard

Yes, it is. The major mattress stores each have their own custom SKUs to defeat comparison.

> You can go to a mattress store and lay on a handful of mattresses and figure out pretty quickly what you like

To some extent, but there's a wear-in period on a new mattress. It takes my body a few days to a few weeks to get used to any new mattress; trying to figure out how that's going to go from a few minutes in a store isn't super effective.

It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not. It’s not like when you’re buying food and you always buy bananas for $1 and you stop to grab a few items at somewhere new & bananas are $2 so you don’t buy them cause you have a baseline.

It’s the same exact thing you seen in automotive sales, how do you tell if something is a good price? Well looking at the car compared to other cars in that area may help but what about one model vs another and so forth.

So go lay on a mattress or test drive a vehicle, all that does is tell you if you absolutely hate the item in question not if you actually like it so you add a wide range of prices on very similar items with unlimited reviews or information on them it’s incredibly overwhelming.

Caspar & others (Tuft & Needle) did a great job with the market by appealing to those concerns. 100 night free trial (T&N) and if you don’t like it, we’ll arrange to pick it up/drop it off at a homeless shelter or similar. Casper did something similar.

Once a decade or half decade larger purchases without a baseline is incredibly stressful for most consumers.

> It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not.

Well, we have Google now.

But if you're willing to buy something of that price range without doing a little bit of research then it's an issue.

I had to buy a mattress recently (because the one I had bought online - for a discount price - sucked). I went to the store and tested the different models.

Though I agree the once a decade thing complicates things.

Shopped for a mattress with my wife. Tried pretty much everything in the store. her favorite was a firm no-frills no topper low end "brand" name mattress (one of the big 3). Was nice to get something delivered for $600ish in a california king. I was more-or-less prepared to spend whatever it took to get something we both liked. That was easy.

From what I have heard, Costco buys Casper mattresses in bulk and are able to charge basically whatever they want.

It does make sense that Casper itself needs higher profit margins than Costco due to the differences in business.

Do they have them out to try in the store?

Not from what I’ve seen. There is a sample you can push your hand into, but certainly it’s not big enough to properly try out.

I think a lot of it is whether you consider the price (whatever it is) to be reasonable. I am willing to spend $1000 on something I spend literally half my life on top of.

foam mattresses at Costco, Amazon, Ikea, etc. are under $500, so this is more than double for something that is not clearly 2x better than comparable products

if this was objectively proven to be the absolute best foam mattress on the market, I would generally agree that paying top dollar for the best is fine for something you spend a lot of time using, but there's nothing out there that suggests this is any better than anything else on the market. It appears as if it's mostly just good marketing.

I had to buy a mattress last year and did a pretty deep dive into the world of mattresses. What I learned is that there's no meaningful research on what's "best", and sleep experts say that it's 100% personal preference (and marketing).

So I bought the cheapest thing on amazon with the best reviews in the size that I needed, which was maybe 25% of the price of Casper or Leesa (and those are about half the price of a traditional mattress). It's absolutely fine. If anything, I sleep better knowing that if I destroy it or have to move, I can just throw it out and buy another one.

One note: if you read enough reviews, you'll notice that some budget foam mattresses can have a smell to them. I assume this is the main thing that "premium" foam mattresses have actually addressed, but obviously it's not advertised as "we have the least smelly product!".

It's really as simple as finding a well reviewed hunk of foam, or at least it was for me, as mine arrived odor-free.

I’ve gotten my last two king foam mattresses from Walmart.com. Comfortable and $500 or less.

I don’t know how places like Casper keep selling mattresses.

For the same reason that you can spend from tens to thousands of dollars on many kitchen appliances, clothes, etc.: branding, appearance, and perceived (although sometimes real) correlation between price and quality. There are additional factors as such a list is bound to be non-exhaustive, but I feel that covers a number of main factors.