Over the past decade, the bed-in-a-box trend exploded, making it difficult for DTC mattress brands to stand out from the crowd.
But that hasn’t been a problem for family-owned mattress brand Naturepedic, which started operating in 2003, long before the boom began.
When DTC mattress brands started blowing up – and investing in digital advertising in a big way – Naturepedic capitalized on the fact that everyone was talking about mattresses by posing a question of its own: What am I really sleeping on?
Part of what separates Naturepedic from its competitors is that it specializes in organic mattresses made with cotton, latex and other natural materials, without any of the synthetics or chemicals that are commonly used in similar products, especially crib mattresses.
The DTC trend “really helped us grow as a company,” Naturepedic Chief Growth Officer Arin Schultz told AdExchanger.
Naturepedic had its largest growth year in the company’s 22-year history in 2024 and is already achieving a higher growth rate for 2025 than it did by this time last year.
Sources of truth
Leaning into its differentiated materials, as well as its work with environmental and housing nonprofits, allows Naturepedic to position buying one of its mattresses as a lifestyle change rather than a routine once-a-decade purchase, like other traditional mattresses, Schultz said.
It also helps, he added, that Naturepedic got its start making child and crib-size mattresses: “Even in tougher economic times, we’re always having babies,” Schultz said.
Naturepedic’s target market consists of health-conscious, upper-income, college-educated households along the West Coast, East Coast (especially Florida) and Texas.
To better reach this audience, Naturepedic adopted a digital attribution model last year that looks at marketing measurement data from multiple sources, including Google Analytics, ad-tracking software Hyros and attribution platform Rockerbox (which was acquired by DoubleVerify last week).
Analyzing multiple metrics, including view-through rates, click-through rates and branded and non-branded search volume, gives Naturepedic a more comprehensive and unbiased understanding of its own digital marketing performance, Schultz said.
Naturepedic can use this data to calculate the most appropriate target ROAS and decide how to retool its strategy depending on the region, channel or where a customer is in the marketing funnel. This allows the marketing team to experiment with more ambitious brand awareness efforts and expansions into new markets.
Take, for example, Naturepedic’s recent Super Bowl-adjacent campaign, which features testimonials from NFL Hall of Famer and former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar. The campaign was meant as a brand awareness play to reach audiences in the Midwest and Middle America, including Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Cleveland, Ohio, where Naturepedic is based.
For one, the campaign targeted an audience Naturepedic hopes to gain more ground with by working with a celebrity that’s more well known in that specific region. But the campaign also focused on the potential health benefits of Naturepedic’s mattresses rather than using Super Bowl-specific messaging so that the messaging would still remain relevant even after the Big Game.
Naturepedic has also been able to generate interesting insights into how different channels perform for the brand.
Buying CTV, for instance, seems to work regardless of the market, Schultz said, although Naturepedic uses CTV ad platform MNTN for targeting specific region and household rather than “blanketing the entire nation.”
Meanwhile, other low-tech options have also proven useful for reaching new and returning customers, like direct mailers in areas where Naturepedic has retail locations.
‘Fine, I’ll do it myself’
What’s especially interesting about Naturepedic’s digital marketing strategy, however, is that it was all developed in house.
It’s rare, Schultz said, for agencies to understand the brands they work with – let alone the products they sell – as well as the brands themselves. In his view, agencies take advantage of the fact that their clients often don’t know how to do media buying themselves in order to justify their rates.
After cycling through three to five agencies that didn’t meet Naturepedic’s expectations, the brand developed its own team of internal employees and consultants in 2023 that Schultz reckons has saved the company “tens of thousands of dollars a month” in agency fees.
For example, the Naturepedic in-house marketing team has one person dedicated to SEO, which has been enough to significantly boost Naturepedic’s search engine traffic.
“You only need one guy or girl in there actually doing it,” said Schultz. “You don’t really need an entire team of people to charge you by the hour.”
Which isn’t to say Schultz is completely against the idea of working with agencies – just that, for Naturepedic, at least, that money is better spent elsewhere, on external comms, for example.
“Getting a really good, solid PR agency has been one of our other factors for growth,” Schultz said. “For anyone thinking about it, I would say, do it, because it’s gone extremely well for us.”
