Carving out a position
A dense market
By 2017 the bed-in-a-box industry was no longer nascent. With a market cap exceeding $1 billion, players like Casper, Purple, and Tuft-and-Needle infiltrated our social feeds and bedrooms with a series of cheeky advertisements, low-commitment incentives, and a disruptive business model that eliminated the need to ever make small talk with a mattress salesperson again.
It was at this time that Texas-based foam manufacturer American Excelsior sought to leverage surplus materials and introduce its first direct-to-consumer product, Somzi.
Establishing legitimacy
As a relative no-name in an already crowded space, Somzi faced an uphill battle towards generating awareness and stealing sales from well-established incumbents. To get the word out and foster a tangible differentiation in a market where consumers must purchase a highly tactile item without ever experiencing it in-person, we built an online resource of industry research and expert advice, Sleep Talking, that empowered shoppers to make educated purchases of perhaps the most intimate item that they will ever own.
In addition we designed an advertising campaign that underscored American Excelsior’s longevity, which exceeds a century of building reliable products.
Garnering influence
With virtually every podcast network already streaming ads for our competitors, we bypassed traditional advertising with a grassroots campaign that spanned developing relationships with influencers, social targeting, and user generated content. At the onset, we drove a 40% increase in traffic (and subsequent uptick in sales) to the e-commerce site, increased site engagement from an average of twenty seconds to two minutes.
