What you can learn about getting ahead of your competition by studying this mattress brand

Ebco Trends
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read
Image Credit: Casper

In April of 2014 Philip Krim, Neil Parikh, T. Luke Sherwin, Jeff Chapin, and Gabriel Flateman launched a new company called Casper Sleep with a crazy goal in mind: they were going to sell moderately priced mattresses, primarily online.

In the mattress industry, a traditional brick and mortar store was the only way to go — how else was a potential buyer supposed to know if they were actually going to like the way they slept on the mattress if they’d never actually, you know, laid down on it?

But Casper bucked that supposed doctrine and sold $1 million worth of product in their first 28 days in business.

How did they do it? What were the trends that allowed them to do it? Well, an emphasis on good, clean branding helped. As did younger customers’ desire to never leave their house. But the biggest thing was people’s newfound trust of online, delivery-based companies. Brands like Blue Apron taught consumers to trust somebody else curating, shopping for ingredients, and creating a meal plan for them. Tesla did the same with their cars: just click a few buttons and you’ll never have to think about creating a menu, or deal with a car salesman again.

Casper allowed people to have a similar experience with their mattress.

They didn’t necessarily innovate on the technology in their mattresses, though. What they did innovate on was the brand experience. And in order to do that, they had to look outside their category.

That’s the secret sauce: how can you look outside your industry to find new behavioral and cultural patterns that will influence consumer expectations with and within your product or service category.

Over the past four years, Ebco has had the chance to work with a variety of high profile clients like Starbucks, Bissell, P&G, Caboodles, and Fiat Chrysler to help them innovate in their product or service categories in new ways. In our work, we spend a lot of time looking across industries to find those unexpected intersection points that will give our clients an edge over their competition and allow them to leapfrog well ahead.

What we’ve learned is that it’s precisely our ability to bring that outside perspective to our clients that gives us, and them, that edge. Often, even at large companies, it’s common to feel siloed in your industry or product category. But at Ebco, we’re coming with many years of combined experience and a broad knowledge of trends across every category and customer experience you can think of.

Programs like our Trend Investigations and Trend Expeditions allow us to look at cultural and behavioral patterns, along with influencers in other, tangential industries or categories to see what kinds of behaviors are becoming more prominent and apply them in non-traditional ways in our client’s category. We also produce a roadmap, to increase clarity for how organizations can activate against these trends in the years to come.

Back to Casper for a second, though, because we left off part of the story. Casper started online and inspired a bunch of similar online mattress brands, and that led to the closing of a lot of brick and mortar mattress stores as they tried to increase their online presence to compete. But that was the wrong lesson to learn, because Casper has been opening stores across the U.S. and are, in fact, quickly expanding to include more brick and mortar stores.

What those other mattress companies and stores should have learned was that it wasn’t about a technological innovation. It was a cultural one. The whole package and experience were necessary to lure younger, more eco-friendly, digital-focused customers to their base.


What are you missing by not looking outside your own category? And how can we help?

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade