Keetsa

A quest to take the agony out of mattress shopping

Like many a good story, ours starts at a crossroads. Fifteen years ago, we were a family-owned mattress manufacturer with a pioneering technology for applying the mattress-in-a-box format to coil as well as conventional foam mattresses. The new process held much promise on both the retail and logistics fronts because it reduced the shipping volume of mattresses to a quarter of what could be achieved with standard packaging methods. None of the existing mattress brands, however, were willing to take a chance on such an unconventional process. After repeated rejection, we decided to launch our own brand—Keetsa—with headquarters in San Francisco.

As we planned for the launch of Keetsa, we toured other mattress specialty shops in the Bay Area for informal market research. But what started out as a light-hearted amble through the mattress marketplace quickly soured into a series of outright painful shopping experiences. The big box retailers were essentially mega-warehouses with oppressive waves of mattresses stashed on all sides. In each case, a salesperson descended upon us with fierce determination to fulfill a quota, turning an already unpleasant experience into a downright distressing one.