Why no king sized on Amazon?
Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
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Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#12Now I'm curious about the mattress industry. I have always wondered why mattresses need salesmen and dedicated stores.
It's roughly because of the inordinate amount of value we derive from furniture (so people aren't all that price sensitive).
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#13I have to find that HN thread. When some post on Warby Parker was here in the homepage, someone commented that the next "too big margin" industry to disrupt should be the mattress one. Nice going! One question - did you guys come from a pure technical background? or did you also have significant experience with the mattress industry before? well done!
Daehee and I are both bay area software guys. Breaking into a new industry that we had zero domain knowledge definitely wasn't easy. It took us quite a while to break in. Most suppliers wouldn't return our phone calls and the ones who did just laughed us out of the room. We had to just keep searching until we found the right people who believed in us.
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#14Awesome reviews! It's probably just me but I had to look around the page for awhile to find the "shop now" link to see the pricing. Maybe making it bigger would help.
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#15I'm ALL for online shopping and the removal of brick-and-mortar stores where they're clearly not needed. I rarely shop anywhere but Amazon Prime these days.
But.
A mattress isn't a trivial purchase (not just in cost, which is what you're disrupting, but in what it does for you). You use a mattress for a large period of your life and it has a great effect on your health (either good or bad).
Being able to physically lie on a mattress in a store provides some value in regards to feeling how hard the mattress is, how it responds to your moving around, etc.
I'm not sure I could buy a mattress online sight unseen and just "hope" it was the one for me (and my wife), hoping I didn't have to deal with returns, etc. (How the hell would I return a mattress via UPS/FedEx?)
Maybe I'm overthinking it?
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#16I’m trying to understand what the difference is between your mattresses and say a regular mattress you buy from IKEA. Are these mattresses more like the futons laid on the floor that are very common in Japan and Korea? Congratulations with the success on Amazon, and thanks for sharing and not posting blog spam!
Well our current mattress is more in line with a traditional mattress. We designed it to be compatible with the floor in addition to a frame, this is how we sort of broke into the market. With a niche angle.
Comparing to Ikea, our prices are only comparable because we cut our margins almost all the way down but the quality of material is very different. In other words, our bed won't sag after just 12 months.
Thank you for the kind words.
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#17Now I'm curious about the mattress industry. I have always wondered why mattresses need salesmen and dedicated stores.
Stores, I'd argue to physically try the mattress.
Salesmen, absolutely no reason.
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#18Do you also sale bed frames or just the mattress? What bed frame do you recommend for your mattresses?
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#19Why no king sized on Amazon?
It looks like there is king size on their site: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/bed
Re: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
#20I'm ALL for online shopping and the removal of brick-and-mortar stores where they're clearly not needed. I rarely shop anywhere but Amazon Prime these days. But. A mattress isn't a trivial purchase (not just in cost, which is what you're disrupting, but in what it does for you). You use a mattress for a large period of your life and it has a great effect on your health (either good or bad). Being able to physically l…
You're definitely right about that. We estimate that 90%+ of our potential customers wouldn't buy our bed unless they were able to touch it and lay down on it.
We setup some really good policies to make it super easy to return without much risk. We'll have it picked up by a 3rd party before having you ship it back to us as an example.
We see ourselves moving offline in the future for sure but to bootstrap, it wasn't really feasible to do anything other than launch online.