When we hear “mattress-in-a-box” we often think of a few key brands, but perhaps not GoodMorning.com. Surprisingly, GoodMorning, founded in Edmonton in 2009, is the company that started the 120-night sleep trial that so many other brands now offer.
Samuel Prochazka, president and CEO of GoodMorning, played a huge role in the online bed shopping, risk-free buying, bed-in-a-box revolution that has taken over the mattress industry.
So why do we think “Casper” and “Endy” when GoodMorning was one of the first on the scene? Prochazka explains below, but ultimately, it’s their advertising strategy. GoodMorning has opted out of bus stop and podcast advertising and focuses more on when a customer is actively looking for a mattress.
It all began after Prochazka had a bad experience buying a bed.
“A little over 10 years ago, I was shopping for a mattress, and I couldn’t believe it. I was bombarded with this pseudo-science, coffee breath, a sales pitch. It was so bad, that I started a mattress business,” says Prochazka. He started a mattress company, “just to change the experience.
“The typical showroom retail experience is stuck in the 80s — where you go in there’s the quintessential salesperson who’s incentivized to sell you the most expensive thing you can afford,” says Prochazka.
This is a problem because we may not walk away with the best mattress for us, and if we’re not satisfied with it, it’s a whole rigmarole to exchange or return it. A salesperson may give us a great deal on that first mattress, but who knows what will happen if we try to exchange it. “There’s a disincentive to exercise the return policy even if you’re discontent with the product,” says Prochazka.
Prochazka has a fun, assertive and “just do it” vibe to him. He noticed an industry needed improvements, so he took it upon himself. “There are little nuances of the industry that caused this distorted customer experience so we decided to just rewrite it,” says Prochazka.
“It was a nail-biter when we first launched it because we didn’t know how many people would return a mattress…but it worked,” says Prochazka. Adding, “as long as we represent the products in the most accurate way as possible, with the criteria that actually matter…then we’ve done our job of getting the right product to the right sleeper. The return rates were much lower than we expected.”
GoodMorning offers seven mattresses; Juno, Douglas, Brunswick, Recore, Logan & Cove, Novosbed and Apollo.
That’s one of their differentiators (their prices are really fair too). GoodMorning doesn’t want to prescribe one mattress for all buyers. Many sleep companies sell one or two mattresses that could be good for customers in the middle of the bell curve, whereas GoodMorning offers different mattresses based on sleep preferences.
GoodMorning has been in operation since 2009, so they have a lot of feedback from customers. That’s why their mattress quiz (where they match us with our optimal mattress) is so effective; it’s backed up by years of data.
“We know our customers very well now. We’ve sold well over 100,000 mattresses and so we have a lot of data. We can choose a segment and manufacture a product that targets that specific segment,” says Prochazka.
“The initiative in 2017 was a mattress for every bedroom, body and budget,” explains Prochazka, adding that “We chose from the largest segment and we worked our way down to smaller and smaller segments with the products that we have.”
Another difference between GoodMorning and its competitors is that it really focuses on function over design. This isn’t necessarily something that GoodMorning is after, but just an assessment (after trying the Logan & Cove), it’s evident that their focus is function.
Some competitors focus on the journey of mattress buying. Their boxes are lined with a pattern, there’s a sweet note when opening the package. You’re getting quality and function with GoodMorning (not that other brands don’t offer these too), but maybe not the same focus on brand aesthetics. Which ultimately doesn’t matter as it’s a mattress.
GoodMorning has given more than a hundred thousand people a great sleep and a…swell dawn’.
“We’re not finished yet, the catalogue is still growing because there are still markets that are suboptimally addressed at this point,” shares Prochazka.
GoodMorning has plans to keep semi-subtly leading innovation in the mattress space. But for now, the elephant in the bedroom is, “Which mattress does Prochazka sleep on?”
“Right now the Apollo. Just until recently, I was sleeping on the original Novosbed, the first one. Just to see how long it would last. To make sure that I was the first of all our customers to actually use the product” responds Prochazka. Adding, “And what I realized is that it outlived me. The mattress doesn’t show any inflection or depression, it’s as good as new. But I’ve changed. I’ve aged. It has outperformed me, so my daughter sleeps on it now and I sleep on the Apollo.”
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