The mattress and bedding industry has gotten very crowded in recent years, but the influx of all these new “bed-in-a-box” companies appears to be in line with consumer demand: the global bedding market is expected to expand to more than $43 billion by 2024, according to Transparency Market Research. One brand is taking advantage of both the growth and changes in consumer shopping habits by marketing to a specific segment: luxury consumers.
DreamCloud is an online-only mattress brand started by the co-founders of Nectar Sleep: Craig Schmeizer, Eric Hutchinson and Ran Reske. While Nectar is on track to reach $300 million in total revenue by January 2019, the founders also wanted to offer a high-end brand that exceeded expectations across the board in design, comfort, quality and price.
“Within the mattress space, when a buyer enters the buying universe, they opt in to the type of product they want as well as the price point that they are targeting,” said Hutchinson in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We quickly realized that the Nectar brand addressed the memory foam market segment very effectively, but there’s another area of the market that wasn’t being addressed — that being the luxury hybrid. There’s 3X to 4X more people buying hybrid mattresses than there are buying memory foam mattresses, but no one has really provided a high-end, direct-to-consumer offering.”
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The 15-inch-high DreamCloud Sleep hybrid mattress includes an “eight-layer hybrid construction,” which features a mixture of cooling gel-infused memory foam, supreme natural latex and patent-pending coil technology. While DreamCloud offers eight unique layers, including five layers of memory foam, Nectar mattresses only have five total layers, with four of them being memory foam.
“When it came to construction of the mattress, we went out and looked to see what would make the best of all worlds and spared no expense with the different technology and materials that we used,” Hutchinson said. “We have five zones of springs in the bed so that hips, feet, shoulders and head all have different firmness to really contour the body. We also covered the bed with a cashmere blend, and then we did what we call ‘TrueTufting,’ where all the layers of the mattresses are held together through a tuft that goes all the way through the bed. Those last two things were steps we didn’t see anyone else taking.”
DreamCloud Targets High-End Shoppers That Rarely Shop Online
Hutchinson noted that the tufting process provides a much longer lifespan for the bed. Pricing ranges from $1,074 for a full size mattress to $1,499 for a California king. Every DreamCloud order comes with a standard 365-night trial as well as an Everlong Warranty, which lasts 10 years and enables customers to get free repairs on their mattresses.
DreamCloud is targeting two specific categories of shoppers with the hybrid mattress. “One is that consumer who is shopping for the Beautyrest Black or other high-end luxury mattress,” Hutchinson. “We cross-sectioned that with people who may have not considered an online purchase. This is an intersection of luxury buyers who historically only would get a high-end experience through a mattress store. It’s showing them that the opportunity to buy a really great set and have a great experience isn’t just isolated to the memory foam segment.”
To further create a fully customizable sleep experience for these consumers, DreamCloud also released an adjustable frame that includes features not typically offered within a mattress. These include three programmable memory settings, USB plugs, a luxury three-zone massage feature and a rest-inducing Zero Gravity setting, which holds the user’s body in the position astronauts use in space to provide alignment and support.
New Offerings Include Health Focus, Luxury Bed Frame
In July, DreamCloud acquired science-based sleep company, Level Sleep, gaining the exclusive rights to sell Level’s health-focused sleep products.Level Sleep’s sleep system includes the TriSupport Mattress and Restore Pillow, which combine to provide lumbar support and optimal alignment of the neck, spine, and body.
DreamCloud then unveiled its second accessories offering, a tufted bed frame and headboard, which the company calls the first of its “luxury mattress accessories.” The company leverages customer feedback when crafting these new offerings, according to Hutchinson.
“We have a survey that goes out to every consumer to understand each point in the decision making of the purchase experience, whether that be the first place they heard about us, the on-site experience, the delivery and product experience and even the returns,” Hutchinson said. “We take that information and plow it back into different areas of the business. The product development cycle never stops…we are constantly adjusting firmness levels, the way the layers are, based on consumer feedback so that we’re always delivering what we think is the highest quality product for the consumers.”
