Casper will open more stores

Casper’s new store has semi-private rooms where customers can trial mattresses.Business Insider/Mary Hanbury

• Mattress startup Casper will open 200 stores in the United States after opening its first permanent location in New York in February, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. 
• These stores are likely to be similar to the New York store, which is designed to be a testing ground for the company to trial new products and see how customers interact with them. 
• Casper CEO Philip Krim told the Journal that the company plans to test out the model of the stores and adjust them based on feedback from customers.

Casper is opening 200 stores. 

Just months after it launched its first permanent location in New York, the online-mattress startup confirmed plans to drastically grow its store count across the US, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Casper CEO Philip Krim told the Journal that sales have grown more quickly in markets where the company has opened temporary stores.

“It’s a way to educate new consumers,” he said, adding that the new stores will help the company to market its other sleep-related products, such as pillows, bed linen, and dog beds, which were more recently rolled out.

Since it launched online in 2014, Casper has become one of the biggest disruptors in the mattress industry. Customers can order the product online, trial it for 100 days, and return it if they don’t like it. Total sales reached more than $600 million in 2017, and it has diversified from its core mattress product to sell all things sleep-related. 

It has also expanded its mattress range to offer more pieces — a queen-sized mattress, for example, can cost from $600 for a standard mattress up to $1,850 for a more technical piece.

50 Cent is an investor, as is Target, which now stocks Casper products in more than 1,000 of its stores across the US.

After running a series of pop-ups around the country, Casper opened its first permanent store in New York in February. The digital retailer is entering the brick-and-mortar game as legacy stores such as Mattress Firm succumb to the pressures of the retail apocalypse, scale back, and shutter stores. But Casper told Business Insider that it has a strategy to make it work. 

“It’s all about creating an amazing experience. It will be a zero-pressure environment with no commission sales people,” cofounder and chief operating officer Neil Parikh told Business Insider.

We visited the store shortly after it opened earlier this year. See what it’s like: