Everything You Didn’t Know About the Mattress Industry

Today in “don’t read this in bed,” we go to Fast Company:

“Casper Sues Sleepopolis with Federal Lawsuit,” read the headline on the page I opened. The post was written by a guy named Derek Hales, the site’s proprietor. Derek’s photo showed a pale, skinny twentysomething with freckles and short red hair. I clicked around on his site. Derek Hales evidently took mattress reviewing seriously, rating the firmness of mattresses on a scale from one to 10, cutting them open to measure the exact thickness of the foam.

I returned to the page outlining the lawsuit.

“From the very first day Sleepopolis launched I knew I wanted to build something different,” wrote Derek. “Reviews rooted in honesty, transparency, integrity, and clarity, without the marketing speak or fluff. Guided by these principles I feel like Sleepopolis readers have the right to know that Casper Sleep has filed a federal lawsuit in New York, suing both Sleepopolis and me, personally.”

David Zax gives us the story of Sleepopolis. It’s also a story of affiliate marketing, whether a blogger has the right to write a bad review, and the levels to which a mattress company will go to influence what consumers see when they search “best mattress.”

You might need to set aside 15 minutes for this piece. But it won’t put you to sleep.

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