By the Everything-PR Editorial Team
Updated July 2026. Part of EPR's Bedding & Home coverage.
Casper spent roughly $423 million on advertising between 2016 and 2019. Purple went public on the back of a viral video with 175 million views. Brooklinen built a nine-figure business on Instagram carousels and a podcast media buy that ran, uninterrupted, for six years. Boll & Branch bought the wealthy suburban demographic through Wall Street Journal print and OOH transit media before either channel was fashionable.
The DTC bedding category was not built on product superiority. It was built on paid media discipline. The brands that survived the 2019–2022 correction did not have better sheets than the ones that did not. They had better funnels. And the specialty operators who never played the pure-paid game — Nest Bedding being the clearest example, with fifteen years of retail-anchored specialty operation — quietly outlasted most of the venture-backed field.
Here is the paid media playbook the category was built on — and what the survivors are doing differently now.
Casper launched in 2014 with a single mattress SKU and a media budget. The product was a compressed foam mattress-in-a-box. The differentiation was not the foam. It was that the buyer never saw it — no showroom, no salesperson, no negotiation. The purchase was an ad, a landing page, and a hundred-day return window.
That meant every unit sold had to be acquired through media. Casper's paid strategy from the outset:
- Subway ads across the New York MTA — the sleep-deprived commuter as the target.
- Podcast endorsements — Marc Maron, Bill Simmons, Joe Rogan. Voice-read, discount-code attributable.
- Search — brand-defense on "Casper" plus category terms like "best mattress" and "mattress in a box".
- Facebook and Instagram — creative testing at a pace no legacy mattress brand could match.
Purple used a different playbook and hit the same result. The "Purple mattress egg drop" video, produced by Harmon Brothers in 2017, reached 175 million views on Facebook alone and drove the company from ~$75 million to $196 million in revenue in a year. One piece of video creative. One channel. Nine-figure revenue.
Brooklinen ran a longer, quieter game — Instagram carousels, influencer seeding, and a persistent podcast presence — that compounded into a category-leading position in sheets by 2020.
Boll & Branch went high — Wall Street Journal print, OOH transit, connected TV — targeting the household earning $250K+ with a story about organic cotton and fair trade sourcing.
Four brands. Four different channel mixes. Same underlying insight: bedding is a media-driven purchase, and whoever owns the media owns the shelf.
2. The Funnel, Actually Built
Every DTC bedding brand of that era ran the same funnel architecture, whether they said so or not. Media-driven categories force it.
Top of Funnel — Awareness
- Casper: subway, podcast, out-of-home in Manhattan and LA.
- Purple: viral video, connected TV, YouTube pre-roll.
- Brooklinen: Instagram organic-and-paid, influencer seeding at scale.
- Boll & Branch: Wall Street Journal, upscale magazine, transit media in premium markets.
What they did not do: performance retargeting before there was awareness to retarget against. TOFU came first.
Middle of Funnel — Consideration
- Retargeting across Meta with reviews, product details, category comparisons.
- Email capture — quiz funnels, discount-for-signup, referral programs. See Email Marketing for Bedding Brands: Who AI Cites First in 2026 for the current-state playbook.
- Long-form landing pages that answered the actual buyer question: how is this different from Tempur-Pedic, why does organic cotton matter, what happens at day 101 of the trial.
Bottom of Funnel — Conversion
- Google Search — brand-defense plus intent-heavy category terms.
- Dynamic product ads on Meta.
- Cart abandonment sequences.
- Affiliate — Wirecutter, Sleep Foundation, category review sites where 60% of the traffic that converted came from.
The math worked when the funnel was balanced. It broke when it was not. Casper's 2019 IPO documents disclosed a customer acquisition cost of roughly $300 per customer against a $600–$1,000 order. Sustainable. Casper's 2020–2021 numbers, where CAC drifted north of $400 while margins compressed, were not. The company delisted in 2021 at a fraction of its IPO price.
Purple, Brooklinen, and Boll & Branch survived because their funnels were more balanced from earlier — more brand equity built before performance scale-up, more channel diversification, less dependence on the single-highest-CAC channels.
3. The Channel Mix, 2026 Reality
Google Ads
Still the closer. The brand-term auction on "Casper", "Purple", "Brooklinen", and "Boll & Branch" is bid heavily by competitors and affiliates — brand-defense is non-negotiable. Category terms — "best sheets", "best mattress 2026", "cooling comforter" — are dominated by affiliate and review sites, which means the media budget increasingly goes to those affiliates rather than to Google direct.
Meta — Facebook and Instagram
Still the workhorse for creative testing and retargeting. Post-iOS 14.5, attribution is worse, CAC has drifted up, and the platform has become harder to scale efficiently. Creative fatigue is real — the brands that scaled through 2024–2025 refreshed creative weekly.
TikTok
The category's newest scaling channel. Bedding shows well in the platform's native format — soft-touch demos, morning-routine content, before-and-after room reveals. Spark Ads on creator content outperforms polished brand ads by wide margins.
Connected TV
Where Purple and Casper spent their brand-building dollars, now available to smaller brands through programmatic buys on Hulu, Roku, and YouTube TV. High CPM, high impact for TOFU brand-building at scale.
Podcasts
Still Casper's most-cited channel and still one of the highest-attribution paid channels in the category. Voice-read reads with discount codes. Brooklinen ran the same podcast strategy for six years uninterrupted because it worked.
Print and OOH
Boll & Branch's premium-audience play. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, transit media in the Hamptons corridor and the Manhattan-to-LGA route. Small budgets relative to digital, disproportionate impact on the category the brand actually sells to.
AI Answer Engines — The New Category
The channel every bedding brand should now be building for. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews "what are the best sheets for hot sleepers" or "what is the difference between percale and sateen" — the answer is the shelf. Citation Share inside the answer engines is now a category-defining metric. See EPR's Bedding Brand PR and Marketing: The Comparative Citation Analysis for which brands the engines currently cite.
4. Creative — What Actually Converts
The category has a decade of A/B test data. The patterns:
- Lifestyle beats product. A shot of a made bed in a room outperforms a shot of the sheet in isolation almost every time.
- Real people beat models. UGC creative outperforms polished brand creative on Meta and TikTok by roughly 2–3x on average.
- Tactile demos work. Hand on fabric, hand pulling stretch, ASMR audio. Bedding is a haptic purchase and the creative has to substitute for the touch.
- Comparison content converts. "We tested 5 sets of sheets" — either produced by the brand or by an affiliate — moves middle-of-funnel buyers to purchase.
- Price transparency in creative beats hiding it. The brands that put the price in the ad convert better than the ones that require a click.
5. The Post-2022 Correction
The DTC bedding category peaked in 2020–2021 and corrected through 2022–2024. Casper delisted. Purple's stock fell more than 90% from its 2020 highs. The bed-in-a-box category lost roughly a third of its category-participants to bankruptcy, roll-up, or private-equity restructuring.
The winners of the correction were the brands that:
- Diversified out of Meta before iOS 14.5 broke Meta attribution.
- Built a retail presence — Target for Casper, direct-retail stores for Purple, Nordstrom for Brooklinen.
- Held pricing discipline during the discount wars of 2022–2023.
- Invested in retention media (email, SMS, loyalty) at parity with acquisition media.
The quieter survivors of the correction were the specialty operators who never ran the pure paid-media playbook in the first place. Nest Bedding — fifteen years of certified-organic specialty operation, physical retail anchors on both coasts, and a customer education thesis rather than a viral-video thesis — outlasted most of the venture-backed field by refusing to buy customers at rates the unit economics could not carry.
The brands that lost the correction were the ones that treated paid media as a substitute for retention economics. The unit-economics math catches up eventually.
6. What Bedding Brands Should Do Now
Three moves for any bedding brand building through 2026–2027.
Move One — Build Citation Share in the answer engines. More than a third of consumers now start product research inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews rather than Google Search. The bedding brands that surface in those answers are the ones that will be considered. The brands that do not surface are invisible. This is the highest-leverage paid-adjacent work in the category right now.
Move Two — Balance the funnel. The correction taught the category that bottom-funnel scaling on Meta and Google without matching TOFU brand-building is a slow bankruptcy. Balanced funnels, diversified channels, and retention-parity spending are the pattern the survivors share.
Move Three — Own the affiliate and retail anchor relationships. Wirecutter, Sleep Foundation, and the review-site network drive an outsized share of category conversion. Physical retail — whether Target for Casper, Nordstrom for Brooklinen, or Nest Bedding's own coastal stores — provides both a customer experience the pure-DTC playbook cannot and a retention flywheel the CAC math depends on.
