EP176 - Tuft & Needle Co-Founder JT Marino   Tuft & Needle (@tuftandneedle) is the original digitally native direct to consumer mattress brand (founded in 2012).  In 2018 they merged with Serta Simmons Bedding company.  JT Marino is a co-founder of Tuft & Needle, now Chief Strategy Officer for Serta. Topics covered: Tuft & Needle origin story Merger with Serta State of the online mattress industry Tuft & Needles Amazon strategy Future of Direct to consumer model Omni-Channel opportunities Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 176 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, June 3rd, 2019. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 176 being recorded on Monday June 3rd 2019 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott show listeners one of our favorite topics here on the Jason Scott show is direct to Consumer brands or digitally native vertical Brands to choose your poison the day we are really excited to have one of the Oggi’s JT Marino she strategy officer at Serta Simmons bedding welcome to the show. Jason: [1:05] We are excited that you’re able to join us tonight JT one of these we always like to start off as give our listener and a little bit of a bio background on yourself can you talk to us about how you came to starts a tuft and needle. Jt: [1:20] Sure so background let’s see so I study Computer Science and Mathematics at Penn State and that’s also where I met my co-founder on it something you don’t Daisy Park we’re best friends bear and help several startups build their engineering and design teams product teams and one of those startups that he actually ended up joining. [1:46] And we decided that we wanted to Branch off and the time was right you wanted to start something of Our Own, but we wanted to do something very different we wanted to start with so trying to trying to come up with an idea this would that I would like this company for this week we really wanted to start with a problem that we knew. I needed to be solved the big problem and what better way than the start with something that you experienced yourselves. And so the idea we went to the prom We settled on was shopping for a mattress. So I add you don’t have to call a judge had gone shopping for a mattress which was supposed to say worse than shopping for a used car. A lot of money like it try to return it couldn’t return it and so literally every night was reminded of this big mistake had made and so that was one of the items that are one of the ideas for your problems to solve. And in a way it was eccentric on the list because it wasn’t software-related which was primarily or background. [2:54] So we decided to do you know instead of coming up with the idea of finding some co-founders building a pitched backcountry. The BBC’s Kearns money building your team W product a year or year-and-a-half later launching it to find out if it works or not he wanted to rapidly test it and see if we can find product. Ideally within a week. So we knew if it would have legs or not or whether we should move on something else so we did was we built a single single page website. [3:28] And I and I actually should say the way that we approached the value proposition in formulating part of the business model was started with what we called hate must be took a legal pad we’re at the tables at the top we wrote down everything we hated about shopping for a mattress and everything we hitting about mattresses example walking into a mattress store and having all of these