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"Mattress-in-a-box" company Casper announced this week that it was being acquired, taking the company private less than two years after the company's IPO. The deal values Casper somewhere around $300m, way down on the frothy $1.1bn valuation from 2 years ago.
Sleeping unsoundly
Casper was one of the most successful early direct-to-consumer businesses, selling thousands of mattresses and sleep accessories since the company was founded in 2014. The product, by all accounts, was pretty good — and Casper got in front of would-be-buyers with clever subway ads, loads of podcast airtime and a lot of marketing spend.
But, as Casper scaled its revenue from tens of millions to hundreds of millions, one thing never followed: profits. Casper's filings reveal a consistent history of operating losses, with the company's generous returns policy and aggressive marketing spend both burning millions each year.
Cutting out the middleman, and going straight to the consumer, is extremely tempting. For huge brands like Nike, which everyone already knows, it makes a lot of sense. But if you need to get the word out? That's going to keep costing you. Case in point; Casper spent $157m just on sales and marketing last year, almost 32% of its revenue.
Back in January we wrote about how the work-from-home revolution was also sparking a revolution in telling-on-your-coworkers. At the time, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had just received 6,911 tips from whistleblowers, which was up 30% on the year before.
Well, we just got the data in for the 12-months to September 2021, and the SEC got over 12,000 tips... a 76% rise on last year.
It's easy to understand why whistleblowing might go up when working from home. It's a lot harder to look over someone's shoulder, and it's a lot easier to pluck up the courage to tell on some shady practices if you don't have to look your boss in the face the day after you do it.
Snitch, then get rich?
There are also some pretty powerful financial incentives for those who inform on wrongdoing that results in successful legal action. Just last week the SEC paid out $12.5m to a whistleblower, whose tip-off resulted in action. That's a nice payday for doing something good, but it's nothing on the enormous $114m that was paid out to one individual last year. All told the SEC has now cut 226 checks, worth a cool $1.1 billion, since 2012.
The proportion of 13-year-old students who say they "read for fun" almost every day has roughly halved since 1984, according to new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report. If you're a big reading advocate, you'll be even more worried by the statistic that 29% of American 13-year-olds now "never or hardly ever" read for fun — a proportion that has more than tripled since 1984.
A picture is worth a thousand words
It's easy to blame the rise of screens, the internet or more TV for the slow demise of "reading for fun". If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a TV show or movie has at least 24 frames per second... you get the idea. Reading for fun has stiff competition, and it's probably only going to get more intense.
1) Netflix has opened up the kimono. After years of being relatively secretive about its viewership data, Netflix has launched a Top 10 on Netflix website, tracking the most popular shows and movies across its platform.
2) Apple is planning to sell parts and tools to help you fix your own iPhone at home, which is a big shift in policy after years of making it hard to fix Apple products without coming in-store.
3) Shares in oat-milk maker Oatly have fallen 20% after it announced it was investigating a "quality issue" with its product.
4) Contemporary art prices have outpaced S&P 500 returns by 174% from 1995 through 2020, besting gold and real estate returns by nearly 2x. We've found an incredibly smart way for investors to diversify in fine art without breaking the bank. Masterworks.**
5) Taylor Swift's re-release of her album Red has broken two records on Spotify, after racking up more than 90 million streams in the first 24 hours.
6) Drug overdoses in the US surpassed 100,000 for the first time in any 12-month period, according to new data from the CDC.
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