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The Economics of Everyday Things

55. Direct-to-Consumer Mattresses

The Economics of Everyday Things

Freakonomics Network

Business

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Online companies promised to bring transparency to the mattress-buying experience. Did that work out? Zachary Crockett takes a look under the sheets.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

At his house in Scottsdale, Arizona, Derek Hales has plenty of space.

0:08.6

He's got six bedrooms and a five-car garage.

0:12.2

But sometimes, things can get a little tight because Hales shares

0:16.7

his home with dozens and dozens of mattresses. I am the founder and editor-in of nap lab.com. It's a platform that tests and reviews

0:26.9

mattresses. Hales is a full-time mattress reviewer and he takes the job very seriously.

0:34.0

So we have 10 different factors that we test.

0:40.0

For cooling, we have a thermal camera that does surface level temperatures.

0:44.0

For motion transfer, we use an accelerometer.

0:47.0

For response time, we're pressing a medicine ball into the mattress,

0:50.0

measuring exactly how long in seconds it takes to recover back to its original shape.

0:55.0

For Edgport, we take photographs in videos and then measure those in Photoshop to the

1:01.0

pixel level to determine precisely how much terms of inches that something is,

1:05.2

bouncing or sinking.

1:07.3

There's a reason Hales goes to so much trouble.

1:10.3

In the US, mattresses are a $13 billion industry.

1:15.0

More and more shoppers now buy their mattresses from direct to consumer brands,

1:19.6

like Casper and Lisa through the internet.

1:22.8

When customers search online for something like

1:25.0

What's the Best Matress?

1:26.8

Nap lab tries to be one of the first results.

1:30.2

And when someone buys a mattress through one of the links on the website,

1:33.4

the mattress brand pays hails a percentage of the sale.

...

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