What’s the Future of the ‘Sleep Economy’?

When I first talked to Phil Krim, CEO of the mattress-in-a-box company Casper, he told me that though his start-up was born online, physical retail locations were central to its future. He recalled being caught off guard on Casper’s 2014 opening day, when a woman walked into his original headquarters and asked to try out one of the mattresses they were selling through their website in a bid to disrupt the bedding business. After converting a conference space into a testing bedroom, Krim said people kept coming in to lie down.

In 2015, the testing room turned into a pop-up location in Los Angeles; in 2017, the Bay Area got a “concept” store in San Francisco and in 2018, New York City’s Noho Sleep Shop opened, where prospective customers could find a chamber of napping pods along with sample beds. In August 2018, when Krim and I spoke, the company had expanded to 20 retail stores across North America. And by September 2019, Casper had more than doubled that number, with 60 retail stores and 18 partnerships with traditional retailers like Target and Costco, which sell Casper products in-house.