Shopping for a mattress is right up there with car shopping when it comes to dreaded retail experiences, but it doesn’t have to be that way, according to Erick Arbe.
“You shouldn’t lay on something for 15 seconds and make the decision right there in the store,” said the Greenville entrepreneur, who runs Web development firm AO Studios with business partner Nick Ondrako. “Especially something that you’re going to have for the next eight years of your life.”
The solution, he said, was to build a better mattress and sell it online. Their startup Hibr (previously Fohm) is one of many beginning to disrupt the mattress industry. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 26 percent of consumers preferred to buy furniture online, but Arbe is banking on a growing familiarity with e-commerce to make the numbers. Bypassing the middleman along with brick-and-mortar costs is better for everybody, he said.
“There’s a host of things that go along with a retail location that we don’t have to deal with,” said Arbe, who said they were able to bootstrap the company and now work on an all-cash basis. “We save money by not having all of that additional overhead – space, employees, rent, electricity, health care.”
Hibr started with a conversation about mattress quality, and how little attention is focused on what we sleep on despite a plethora of sleep research, said Arbe. The pair launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 to develop what they called the most technologically advanced pillow ever made. Pillow sales – which really took off when they started selling through Amazon Prime, he said – supported two years of high-tech mattress development, and after cycling through a handful of suppliers, they were ready.
Arbe said the mattress adapts to different body shapes, weight and movement, which bolster better quality sleep when paired with the two-inch cooling technology top layer.
“The days of soft or firm bed, and judging the bed simply by that … that’s really how people shouldn’t judge a bed,” he said. “It should honestly be how you feel when you wake up in the morning. If you’ve had a good night’s sleep, that should be a good judge.”
Prices vary by size – there are six of them – and the whole thing fits into a 20-by 21-by-40-inch box, about the size of a mini-fridge. The mattress expands in about a minute, Arbe says.
While some might raise an eyebrow at an $875 queen (or $950 king) mattress without a jump test, Arbe says consumers are increasingly comfortable buying online. The free shipping and 100-night guarantee don’t hurt, he added.
“The industry is shifting to the e-commerce platform, and if you look at the price cost between us and what Tempur-Pedic calls middle-of-the-road, we’re drastically better,” said Arbe. “These big-box mattress firms … are still in business, but as millennials get older and move out of the house, they’re looking to buy online.”
