Casper - no ordinary business, no ordinary name.
Buying a mattress is a singularly unexciting task.
First of all, you have to visit huge showrooms with acres of bland beige or white products that all look the same. Then you have to ‘try out’ the product for a few minutes at most - fully clothed, in public - and make a decision that you’ll live with for years. (And, let’s face it, they all feel pretty much the same, don't they?) Then you’ve got to arrange for delivery, and eventually struggle up the stairs or down the corridor with the world’s most cumbersome home product.
And you pay a small fortune for the privilege. It's a very dull nightmare.
So how do like the idea of buying the product online? Just select your size (Double? Queen? King?) and wait for it to be delivered in a box. Yes; a box.
That’s what the guys at Casper have done. They’ve created a product that conventional wisdom says shouldn’t be possible. It’s a mattress that pretty much everyone will find comfortable. And it’s decidedly cheaper than the products in the mattress store. Just pick the right size …and wait for the box to be delivered. (OK, so it’s quite large box, but still only the site of a small fridge.) Take a look at the unpacking video here, if you don’t believe me.
You’ll get the message that this isn’t an ordinary mattress company. And they’re not ordinary mattresses. And this certainly isn’t how mattresses are usually sold.
How do you name a business like this?
So how would you go about naming a business that really, really isn’t like all the others? Well, for a start, your name should not contain the word Sleep. Or Night. Or Dream. And it doesn’t begin with an S, like most mattress brands. Nor is the name based on combinations of spurious technological jargon words that sound clever (and expensive) - Spring-this, Pocket-that. Something Lumbar, and so on.
None of that. It’s called Casper. And they have the perfect casper.com domain.
Why Casper? Who cares? It’s a concept that you won’t forget, with a name that sticks in the mind. And the name does more than stick in the mind. It tells you very clearly that they are not like all the other mattress companies. In a very short time, it's become a powerful brand name.
Why Casper? Well, it has nothing to do with friendly ghosts. If you insist on a rationale, the name apparently comes from an old college friend of the founders - he was just an easy going, sleepy kind of guy.
To me, this isn’t just an inspiring story of entrepreneurial chutzpah - disrupting a stuck-in-the-past business model by doing the seemingly impossible. It’s also a business naming masterclass.
