 Ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage Jeff Brooks chief marketing officer of Casper. Hello hello how is everybody yeah well rested see what I did there you get your 8.4 so housekeeping matters first contrary to the queries of about three people now this is not a pajama top someone sent out an email saying that if you own a piece of linen this would be the appropriate venue for it Kate's closed okay enough about that so that was awesome by the way Alex is great and it's such an honor to be here thank you at week and brand week and in the company of some great brands among them Casper I'm Casper CMO I've been working with the business for about a year and a half half of that time on the agency side running their agency and then for the past nine months in house as their CMO and it's been quite a journey and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about it today and hopefully one or two things will stick with you beyond this conference first of all how many of you have Casper's in this room it's pretty good that's about in line with West Coast consumption that's not bad fascinating right so for a company that's just over four years old that started with one mattress one distribution channel one geography today we have over 10 product categories with hundreds of SKUs we have owned an operated retail fleet of 20 stores and growing in the US and Canada we have wholesale distribution with partners like Amazon Target Nordstrom and we ship to seven countries around the world so pretty pretty awesome and the press since the theme of this conference and presentation is disruption the press has been talking about disruption to from the beginning but what I love about it is that the things that we're doing are clearly getting picked up as time passes right so the beginning was all about disrupting an old category and bed in a box and you know upending traditional mattress it's moved to establishing really like a sleep as a lifestyle and what the mindset around that is and most recently taking on brick-and-mortar and bringing that same spirit of design thinking customer centricity innovation into the physical world so it's been pretty awesome and and when you when you do stuff like that consumers tend to reward you I'm gonna just read you one or two of these because I'm going somewhere with this my Casper mattress these are all in the last year and most of them in the last few months my Casper mattress is so comfortable I didn't get to feel the earthquake I have to say that hand on my heart my mattress is the most comfortable mattress I ever slept on currently going to bed around 8 p.m. just to spend more time on it I may not even get up on Christmas Day right like this is the stuff that comes in every every single day somebody tried to tell me their mattress was more comfortable than my Casper hashtag fake snooze that was a good one that was a good one right and so why what why is the business taking off like this why is Casper still a darling of the press four and a half years later and why are consumers anthropomorphizing this mattress as though it's a member of their family my conviction to you my thesis for you today would be that as we think about challenger brands that a lot of times we get caught when we think about innovation on the hamster wheel innovation and that is a cautionary tale where you get stuck in the commodity trap just because the pace of change is simply too fast to keep up if you're chasing what I call dash ER marketing better marketing right so your product has to be better on some level your service has to be better on some level your value proposition has to be better on some level or else you don't have a business but different differentiation is the thing that actually in my mind creates sustainable long-term advantage it's easier to defend and it actually is where the core of your value proposition sits and that's what we're going to talk about a little bit for the next I can't possibly seven minutes seven minutes really oh man I gotta go so Casper started you guys all know based on an observation in a category that hadn't been changed in 150 years right which was that a few players controlled supply and distribution and the the experience of buying a mattress kind of sucked you went into a big store clearing house of mattresses all over the floor commission salesperson hovering over you with his clipboard trying to get you in that bed and out the door and Casper revolutionized that so the idea of sort of putting people first in the DTC model was core to Casper fortunately for me and all of us the founders of the company realized that they had to very early on go beyond just what I would call a business model sense of disruption into disruption in a more experiential way and a lot of times when we talk about digital transformation or disruption we tend to think about technology and business model a lot of what I'm going to show you today is not that it's about thinking about disruption where every single interaction you have with a prospect or customer is a brand touch point thinking about building a world a visual world for your brand and your products that is so differentiated that it can't be copied right that's what this company did four and a half years ago that we still push out in the world today this whimsical approachable playful sort of aesthetic that drives a lot of what we do same with the tone of voice so from the top of the page to the bottom this is from four years ago to two weeks ago and I won't read these because in the spirit of time and keeping moving but you're starting to see that there's there's a playfulness and inviting nature to the way that we talk about this that really resonates with people you spend a third of your life in your bedroom or with your mattress and so for us to be able to make that more approachable is really really compelling I love that one by the way a copywriter deserves a bonus for that your mattress will always be there for you through the good times in the bedtime so we like our puns at Casper you know there's a couple more coming your way don't worry but it's really important this is fascinating to me so if that tone of voice and visual kind of world is what we would call marketing the one to many we spend as much time maybe more and what I'll call the one to one so we have a dedicated in-house group of people who do nothing but DM with customers and prospects every single day if you guys could read the the library of stuff that I'm fortunate enough to read daily or nightly it's it's a blessing this woman on the left her Instagram handle is Vagablogger she for 135 days straight including today has been publishing stories on Instagram of her DMs with Casper we are now in the part of the relationship where we are planning a trip together we're going somewhere tropical she decided and we told her that it was a great thing we'll bring our humidity fighting duvet this is the kind of stuff that happens on a daily basis someone said hook that duvet up with a cake and I promise I'll buy it we asked him what his favorite kind was we sent it with a go-to-bed message on it he sent us back the purchase receipt for the duvet okay this is the kind of stuff that really really matters if you think again about what is this category that has basically treated customers like numbers and receipts and how do you get to them on a human level so they want to participate in your brand why is different greater than better because this is the stuff that truly creates lasting value Casper has gotten into the world of physical retail so we have as I mentioned just over 20 stores now in the US and Canada and there's some very deliberate things that we've done here the first is that we don't have commissioned sales people so all of our sleep specialists and store associates are salaried employees who go through slurps sleep certification and brand value training just like any other employee would and critically on the right side you know we did a lot of consumer research and we found out guess what people don't like to try beds and lie on beds that they're going to spend a lot of money on a time with in a giant open environment so we created these done right like but we did it we created these modular beautiful little homes that sit in our stores could the stores be more productive from a dollar per square foot standpoint if we shoved more mattresses all over the place maybe but our conversion rates are super high the stores are more productive than we thought and in fact this business model has been so successful that we can't keep up with demand because now you have to book your time in the stores in 10 minute intervals to try all the beds even when we go into wholesale where we lose a little bit of control with our brand one of the things that we're really keen on is making sure even in those co-branded environments that we have privacy screens simple little things that keep and remind consumers that we understand them from tracking along with them on their shopping journeys we understand where they want to be in the space they want to be in when they're trying this kind of product we also pull consumers into our product development and i know a lot of companies talk about that a lot of them don't do it so Casper Labs has existed since the beginning of Casper it's an r&d facility in san francisco where most of our product design is done through co-creation with our best customers so they receive an incentive oftentimes to come help us ideate do shop alongs beta test products take new products home it's unbelievable some of our greatest innovations have come through there we've created videos for product design and development where we interact with them it's really really important and again for a category that really just thinks and drives its product development and pipeline by what you know it's going to create the most money for them versus what do consumers really want what are the unmet needs that was a big unlock for us now i'll have you know that some of our customers are non-humans you know Casper was one of the uh Casper was the first company to create a dog bed in this category number have copied it since but what did we do to launch our dog bed recently we created what we called a dog fluenser steak dinner so we went out and found uh the most i guess you know the the dogs with the most social cred on the interwebs and invited them all to a steak dinner um where they could try the bed and and nausea and enjoy themselves a little bit a lot of press wrote about it every a list dog you know is that this is insanely posh event right but even that notion of customer centricity down to the four-legged kind i think is pretty cool that drives a lot of what we do um and look part of Casper's belief from the beginning was that it's really healthy to get the conversation of sleep outside of the bedroom okay so for three and a half years now we have had what we call our nap tours where we go around the country with these beautifully outfitted uh you know vans and trucks and we go to places where we think people really need sleep so these are not places where if you're hung over and you just want to crash for two hours it's not that i mean maybe it wasn't the very early days and we were like a dot com brand doing all that but now it's about more purpose driven giving people who need rest that chance to rest it's also obviously a great commercial opportunity for us to get people trialing our products and then buying them online but it's not just at the pavement level it's at 30 000 feet so about a year 15 months ago we became american airlines uh preferred sleep partner so we outfit their planes now um uh with Casper products ranging from pillows and duvets and mattress toppers to other types of things and i think that's another way where again it's healthy to bring these the conversation of sleep outside of the bedroom and most recently guys i'm at zero is it okay if i go on for about three minutes yeah okay um most recently about four months ago um we opened an experiential uh space in manhattan called the dreamery and the dreamy is a place where you can come in and buy a nap now why did we do that because we believe that in this day and age especially for the under slept which is most of you it's one of our largest you know consumer profiles or segments you're all the under slept in case you didn't know that um not being it's actually really healthy too long a nap is not healthy but if you take a nap for about 30 35 minutes and if you've done this you know it re-energizes you it's powerful we have nap pods in all of our offices it is not uncommon at Casper to walk around and see employees drooling at 2 30 in the afternoon and other people passing by as if nothing was going on we have totally normalized the idea within our company that when you are tired it is okay to put your head down and snooze out for a little bit but for a long time i think we've been fighting some cultural headwinds right the the CEO of Netflix saying HBO is not i'm sorry if you're here by the way HBO is not my enemy sleep is i'll sleep when i die i think we've turned a corner thanks to ariana and a lot of other people and Jeff Bezos who are publishing you know you're noticing that people who are well rested are actually you know perform better in the world and they're happier and there's data from every single scientific study that says that sleep is as critical to our happiness our health our moods our stability our relationships our mortality as exercise or wellness um so for the last two or three minutes what i want to talk to you about is what we have our sites set on next from a disruption standpoint and that is disrupting this stigma that still exists in large part that it's okay it's okay to not sleep and that you'll make it up on the weekends or to come into work with four and a half or five and a half hours of sleep it's not okay in fact let me tell you something i'm going to show some startling numbers for those of you that haven't seen this yet the world health organization has basically declared a sleep loss epidemic in industrialized countries i'm not going to go through all these stats you can read them 1.2 million missed work days a year 25 percent of fatal traffic accidents are sleep related and guess what if you don't buy into that stuff and you want to put your commercial hat on 2 percent of our country's gdp is is affected in terms of loss productivity from insomnia or fatigue okay this is a big big deal not just in the us but around the world and here's the thing we all know it so we've just conducted some research and we asked thousands of people this is us only you know how much do you think each of the following contributes to your physical health and your mental well being and the amount of sleep i get in both cases trumped god i can't use that word beat the amount of exercise i get each day or how healthy i eat so the reality of sleep is indeed a third pillar of wellness it's the third pillar of wellness and we have a really big job to do to cement that you know sleep's position in that conversation because it has huge huge impact on everything else there's uh you know i mean if you want to just google it and check it out there's plenty of stuff you can read about it i feel like we've turned a corner now in our culture and this is a part that really excites me about casper um we'll continue to make new products we'll continue to do fun stuff with animals we'll continue to do world-class marketing but i think if you're gonna you know be having me back in two or three years the thing i'm really hoping that we're talking about and what i'd ask for all of your help in you all you know believe in exercise and fitness you all don't sleep enough or the majority of you don't you all have companies that have wellness programs that invest in initiatives for exercise and for diet get sleep on the radar talk to us talk to other people but we believe that a well-rested world is a better world and uh and with that sorry had to do it thank you