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Mattresses are a hard category right now. Arin Schultz, chief growth officer at Naturepedic, puts the industry down 12 to 15% on last year. He says Naturepedic was up 46% in May and nearly 68% in July. The company is private, so I can’t check any of this against a filing, and I’m reporting it as his. Even discounted, the gap is wide. I wanted to know what they were doing that the rest of the category wasn’t.

Naturepedic was one of the first organic mattress brands. Three engineers own it, and for years its ads explained the science and stopped there. Arin changed the copy without asking anyone, and he says some campaigns did five times better afterward. Organic shoppers were already finding Naturepedic on their own. Growth had to come from people who have never thought about organic, and they weren’t going to read a chemistry lesson. Most DTC brands I talk to still write their ads for customers they already have.

Naturepedic picks store sites from a heat map of where its website visitors live. Arin says a new store lifts digital sales nearby by 10 to 15%. In Atlanta that lift reaches 30 to 45 miles out.

The old Chicago store was on a dead-end stretch of Armitage with no parking. Arin went to Chicago at least eight times before choosing Highland Park, and he says that store now outsells New York. He told me a store takes a year to eighteen months to mature. A lease runs five years. Eight more stores open by January, and he wants to stop at 50 to 70. As the example to avoid, he named a part of Cleveland where you can walk between three Mattress Firms.

Arin doesn’t trust what Meta or Google report, because each claims credit for the same sales. Naturepedic runs three attribution tools side by side, and he thinks the combined answer is about 80 to 85% right. I liked that he put a number on the error. He also won’t pay the $30K to $50K he says a top spot on a best-mattress list costs. He’d rather hire someone to run influencers with that money.

Arin also said they had to slow down in July because manufacturing couldn’t keep up. That’s a good problem this year. I’m less sure what it means two years from now, with dozens of leases signed, if the market stays soft.