Imagine the following scenario: For some time, you have known that you need to shop for a new mattress. You are putting off doing this because you dread the experience. You imagine yourself walking into a mattress store, looking at a sea of mattresses, receiving contact from what you find to be a pushy salesperson, and trying to pick out a mattress by lying on several of them for a few minutes in the store. You also dread trying to get whatever you buy up to your second-floor apartment. Then you remember hearing about Casper. Launching in 2014, Casper pioneered the direct-to consumer position in the mattress industry. It started by selling a single mattress that arrived at the buyer’s home in a box, about the size of a mini fridge, and the mattress would unfold in front of the buyer when removed from the box. Many have studied Casper’s startup story, largely because of the firm’s innovation.

It entered a tired, well-established industry and, instead of creating another mattress and accepting the industry as-is, it started from scratch. It studied the mattress industry and asked people what they did and did not like about mattresses as a product and about the mattress buying experience. Armed with consumer insights, Casper reimagined the processes used to manufacture and sell mattresses. They followed the mantra “make something people want” rather than falling in line with industry norms.

Here is the Casper startup story. Many businesses, including some featured in this text, acquired important insights by studying how Casper went about trying to understand its industry and how it used what it learned to instill a new sense of excitement and create a vibrant new position in a well-established industry......

Discussion Questions:

1.This case begins with the observation that Casper’s goal was to “make something that people want”
rather than following the then-current industry norms.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest), how successful was Casper in achieving this goal? In one or two short sentences, describe the approach that Casper took to make something that people wanted.
2.Were you surprised by how much Casper learned about the mattress industry by studying the industry and talking to people about their experiences? What lessons about how to approach an industry could accrue to startup founders by studying Casper’s experience?
3.What is it about Casper’s experience that you think causes so many people to study the firm’s startup story? List three things that you learned from Casper’s story.
4.Are you surprised that Casper was able to generate so much excitement surrounding the process of buying a mattress? (Think of the YouTube unboxing videos as an example.) How did Casper generate this level of excitement? Do you think that entrepreneurs could find ways to translate the excitement and passion that exists now for buying a mattress into other industries?