Daehee Park is setting out to simplify mattress shopping after years of disruption and growing competition in the space.
Park, alongside Tyler Marino and Corben Leo, this week announced the launch of their new company, Boring Mattress Co.
“Our vision was simple: cut the crap and make buying a mattress easy and brutally honest,” Park said on the company’s website. “No more navigating through a maze of overhyped buzzwords and confusing jargon.”
The mattress space is one that’s familiar to both Park and Marino. Park is a co-founder of DTC mattress company Tuft & Needle, which in 2018 merged with Serta Simmons Bedding. And Marino was Tuft & Needle’s first employee and served as its head of product development.
Leo, who the company calls an “ethical hacker,” comes with more personal experience in the mattress industry, as a consumer.
“I needed a mattress after college and I wanted to buy one online. That experience was extremely frustrating and confusing. It was impossible to figure out what I needed, what I was paying for, and if the promises these companies were making were actually true,” Leo said in an email to Retail Dive. “It's quite ironic, but the ‘disruptors’ worsened the problem they set out to solve. Everyone's making the same claims using the same marketing gimmicks. It's getting old and people are starting to figure it out.”
The company points to an overly saturated market that’s made shopping for a mattress online too complicated. “In the past, you only had to dodge the pushy sales guy at the local mattress store. Now, shopping online bombards you with too many brands and a crazy amount of mattress models,” Park said.
The brands that paved the way for disruption faced challenges and began to reveal cracks in their models. About two years after filing for an initial public offering, Casper in 2021 was acquired by private equity firm Durational Capital Management. Casper shifted its focus to profitability, ditching the growth-at-all-costs mindset touted for years in the DTC space. Purple — which has faced financial problems of its own, recently lowering its full-year guidance — has started to prioritize a higher-end consumer and last year introduced two premium collections. And Park said that even Tuft & Needle “lost sight of its original mission” after the Serta merger.
“It began mimicking the industry norms we once joked about — like mixing in extravagant, unnecessary features (e.g. diamond dust) and hiking up prices,” Park said. “The fundamental concept of offering a comfortable, affordable mattress without any gimmicks had faded away.”
The launch of Boring Mattress Co. comes as the home sector experiences challenges. After receiving a boost at the height of the pandemic when many consumers actively sought out products for their home, home goods retailers are now facing waning demand and declining sales. Sales in the home category have steadily declined for the past several months, according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce. And early last year, Serta Simmons Bedding filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the months since the filing, the company has experienced executive turnover, including one CEO exiting after just three months.
