Last Summer, ReST® attended our first IRONMAN expo in Boulder, Colorado. We knew we are onto something with our messaging and wanted to see what would happen when we presented our ReST Bed™ first hand to elite triathletes. Our message was “This is not JUST a mattress. This is a sleep hygiene and recovery tool designed for athletes.”
IRONMAN Boulder
We knew that other mattress companies had tried, and failed, to present their beds at races before, and that the triathlete community was a highly intelligent community. More than half of these athletes have advanced degrees, are highly educated with respect to fitness, recovery, health and well being, and that traditional ‘mattress industry’ sales approaches wouldn’t work, so we resorted to a simple strategy, tell the truth.
As you can imagine a lot of initial reactions were highly skeptical, to say the least.
- “Why are there beds here?”
- “What is a mattress doing at an IRONMAN event?”
- “Oh look honey, there’s two guys over there with mattresses under a tent wanting people to try them out. That’s creepy.”
Other vendors at the event, like the bike shops, wetsuit stores and electrolyte water folks were also amused by our presence. We got a lot of curious looks and nods from our neighbors that suggested, “Well, this is funny. Best of luck selling beds to this crowd boys.”
But we stuck to our guns and began demoing the ReST Bed™ to anyone brave enough to lie down and give us three minutes of their time. After three days of demoing the ReST Bed™ to the age-groupers we had started to slowly but surely earn the trust of the crowd, and even a sliver of respect from our neighbors. And we sold a whopping….wait for it….one bed.
And that was all we needed to know. It worked! The ReST Bed™ is the best mattress for athletes! We may have only sold one bed, but that week in Boulder we showed the bed to hundreds of athletes and word started to spread. The following week our website traffic hit an all time high.
IRONMAN Chattanooga
We did IRONMAN Chattanooga a few weeks later and sold four beds! On top of that, the community was clearly getting used to us being there. ReST® was gaining legitimacy with each new demonstration, and the IRONMAN community approved of us being there, sandwiched right between the bike repair tent and the swim skin kiosk.
IRONMAN World Championship in Kona
By the race in Hawaii last October, Mirinda Carfrae, a 3X world champion was sleeping on one of our beds (she came in 2nd, and called her bed her “secret weapon” for training and preparing for Kona). More than 50 professional athletes had contacted us to see about getting a bed, and our online sales had started to spike, 90% of whom were avid triathletes and runners. In Kona, we sold 15 beds over three days, our social media traffic went through the roof, and our #raceReSTrecover was trending.
What do we attribute our success to?
The answer is as simple as our demonstration, we told them the truth. An athlete’s body is constantly in a state of change. One night your shoulders are sore, the next night your hips and legs are throbbing. And your quality of sleep and recovery directly correlates to your overall training.
The ReST Bed™ provides two dynamic solutions to maximize recovery for athletes:
- Customizable zoned support: Our five zones (head, shoulder, lumber, hips and legs) allow you to custom fit the feel and support to your body’s needs, and when your needs change, the bed can change right along with you.
- Real time automatic adjusting support: We all change positions when we sleep, and overtime staying in one position too long can reduce blood flow to that part of the body, which can impede recovery. The ReST Bed™ however is the first and ONLY bed that factors this in, and uses a medical grade sensor cloth to map and identify building pressure. It then automatically adjusts while you sleep, to ensure you get improved circulation, resulting in deeper and more restorative sleep.
This year we’ve already more than doubled our sales from all of last year, and in Q1 alone we blew past our entire FY2016 sales. And all of that was before the 2017 triathlon season began. ReST® is now poised to be the next major industry disruptor, thanks in large part to that one bed we sold in Boulder, CO last Summer. Attending race expos is now the highlight of our year. We’ve spent 18 months preparing the building blocks to make ReST® a successful product, brand, and company, and being embraced by the athletic community will end up being the catalyst that turned ReST® into the household name we plan on being in the very near future.
