Wildly popular mattress-in-a-box startup Casper just opened its first store in NYC - here's why it thinks it can win where Mattress Firm has struggled

Business Insider/Mary Hanbury

Casper's new store has semi-private rooms where customers can trial mattresses.

• Mattress startup Casper has opened its first permanent store in New York.
• The store is designed to be a testing ground for the company to trial new products and see how customers interact with them.
• Casper is a digitally native brand that launched in 2014. The company's total revenue since inception reached more than $600 million in 2017, and it counts Target and 50 Cent among its investors.

Casper wants to create the Disneyland of mattress shopping.

Since launching online in 2014, mattress startup Casper has become one of the biggest disruptors in the industry. Customers can order the product online, trial it for 100 days, and return it if they don't like it.

In the past few years, the company has grown rapidly - total sales reached more than $600 million in 2017, and it has diversified from its core product, the mattress, to sell all things sleep-related, from sheets and pillowcases to dog beds and calming tea.

It has also expanded its mattress range to offer more pieces - a queen-sized mattress, for example, can cost from $600 for a standard mattress up to $1,850 for a more technical piece.

50 Cent is an investor, as is Target, which now stocks Casper products in more than 1,000 of its stores across the US.

After running a series of pop-ups around the country, Casper opened its first permanent store in New York on Tuesday. The digital retailer is looking to get into the brick-and-mortar game as legacy stores such as Mattress Firm succumb to the pressures of the retail apocalypse, scale back, and shutter stores. But Casper says it has a strategy to make it work.

"It's all about creating an amazing experience. It will be a zero-pressure environment with no commission sales people," cofounder and chief operating officer Neil Parikh told Business Insider.

We visited the new store to see what it's like:

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