Eight Sleep: Gadget-style Mattresses
If one considers a car as basic transportation, then any decent vehicle (say, Kia) is perfect: it does get you from A to B, it doesn’t break down, it has automatic transmission, parking sensors and safety airbags. You can also pick the size of the trunk within a reasonable price range. However, car owners nowadays do not want to buy basic transportation but prefer to choose a car as a gadget that makes them happy and reflects their social status. So they buy turbo engines just to be stuck in traffic. There is not much common sense around this gadget-like approach but it definitely works for dealers: cars are being sold at higher prices and their owners come back to car dealers for an upgrade more often.
US-based #startupoftheday Eight Sleep follows suit: they want their customers to view mattresses as gadgets. The traditional approach of selecting a mattress involves a number of well-targeted but basic features including number of layers and level of firmness. It would be hard to sell a six-layer mattress to the same client who bought a five-layer one just a year ago. Eight Sleep founders with their out-of-the-box thinking have added “cool” features to their product instead of practical ones. For example, their mattresses have temperature control with a range from 12 to 46 degrees Celsius and are managed via a mobile app compatible with smart speakers (Alexa, warm my bed up to 23 degrees!). Eight Sleep gadgets also collect and analyze sleep data and give advice for better sleep. How cool is that and how can you possibly not buy one?
Subscription to the statistics service costs USD $20 per month with the first year for free — which is not that much considering the mattress itself is USD $2.5K — but the margin is far from that of a material product. Plus, chances are a lot of customers will buy an upgraded version of the device in a year to save on subscription. For sure, there will be new features available by that time: boosted heating mode or solar batteries that work with in-house lighting — new features are constantly being added to gadgets.
The startup raised USD $40 million in investment in early November.
