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Comment by timjahn | Hacker News Reader

I'm ALL for online shopping and the removal of brick-and-mortar stores where they're clearly not needed. I rarely shop anywhere but Amazon Prime these days.

But.

A mattress isn't a trivial purchase (not just in cost, which is what you're disrupting, but in what it does for you). You use a mattress for a large period of your life and it has a great effect on your health (either good or bad).

Being able to physically lie on a mattress in a store provides some value in regards to feeling how hard the mattress is, how it responds to your moving around, etc.

I'm not sure I could buy a mattress online sight unseen and just "hope" it was the one for me (and my wife), hoping I didn't have to deal with returns, etc. (How the hell would I return a mattress via UPS/FedEx?)

Maybe I'm overthinking it?

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You're definitely right about that. We estimate that 90%+ of our potential customers wouldn't buy our bed unless they were able to touch it and lay down on it.

We setup some really good policies to make it super easy to return without much risk. We'll have it picked up by a 3rd party before having you ship it back to us as an example.

We see ourselves moving offline in the future for sure but to bootstrap, it wasn't really feasible to do anything other than launch online.

Kudos for bootstrapping and being lean about this. Even cooler that you think 90% of people won't buy it without physically touching it and you STILL started online!

Site looks great, photos are excellent, product looks great based on all that. Having bought 2 new mattresses in the past 2 years, I know how shitty the mattress buying experience is.

Good luck to you, definitely rooting for ya!

Thank you!

I don't know. I recently bought a fairly expensive Stearns & Foster mattress and lying it for a few minutes in the store didnt tell me much. You basically end up trusting that it won't get saggy after a couple years because it's more expensive and thats basically of what you pay for. These are so cheap it's almost worth the risk. It's sort of like Warby Parker.

We bought a VI-Spring mattress last year.

Part of the conditions of the satisfaction guarantee is that you have to have certification that you lay on the appropriate demonstration mattress for at least 30 minutes.

I don't see that listed here but it's in our hard-copy, and the retailer emphasised it before purchase:

http://www.vispring.com/our-promises/guaranteed

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