May 20, 2016
Michael Covel talks with Daehee Park and JT Marino. They are the
owners and founders of Tuft and Needle, a modern mattress company.
They met during college at Penn state, parted ways after college
and then met back up in Silicon Valley at a startup tech
company.
Two young men, who had never worked at a mattress store and were
coming straight out of Silicon Valley, hardly fit the mold of
mattress company tycoons. When they first started Tuft and Needle,
the majority of questions they received all circled around how and
why they came to enter the business of mattresses. The answer was
quite simple; JT and Daehee started the company based on horrible
personal experiences buying mattresses. After their experiences and
talking about them together, the two sat down and wrote out all the
painful things associated with shopping for a mattress and
discussed how they could eliminate those experiences. They came to
find out that their wasn’t any “love” or brand loyalty associated
with a mattress or the company. This was something they wanted to
change.
Since they started with zero mattress experience, Michael asks the
obvious question, “What was the first step you took once realizing
you wanted to be in the mattress business?” The first step was
building up the list of negative experiences they had encountered
with personally buying a mattress. Second step was trying to figure
out, “What is a mattress? What is the science involved? What are
the root principles? And working backwards from that.” They ripped
open one of their own mattresses and figured out the components.
After seeing the makeup of the mattress, they called around to
manufacturers to figure out what it would cost to build.
Next, Michael asks “What kind of motivation did you have for
disrupting the industry?” JT and Daehee only figured out the kind
of traction they could gain after about a year. They didn’t know
how big of an “old boys club” the mattress industry really was.
However, their success has proved that there was definite need for
disruption in the industry. The bar was set so low to begin with in
the industry that they immediately started disrupting it in all
areas: price, technology and service by just by listening to
customer feedback. Even with increasing their marketing over the
years, the majority of their growth is 70% organic and word of
mouth.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
- Marketing a company
- Growing a startup
- Product development
- Importance of customer service
- Creating art
- Simplification of products
- Venture capital