50 Fastest Growing Private Companies to Watch 2016

Your future depends on your dreams, so go to bed: Leesa Sleep, LLC

The Silicon Review

Like so many people, the entrepreneurs behind Leesa had trouble sleeping. We bought beds offering all sorts of benefits, from coils to memory foam – nothing worked. What’s more, the experience of trying out mattresses in showrooms with salesmen peering down on us was horrible. None of the features actually helped us sleep better – probably because most of them were hocus-pocus.

We approached a friend and long-time industry veteran and asked, “If you could redesign the mattress and reinvent the sleep experience, what would you do?” His response was “I’d simplify it and take out all the “stuff” we’ve been adding for years to justify higher prices.”

From this idea, Leesa was born. The Leesa mattress is a completely redesigned mattress offering what we call a Universal Adaptive Feel™ that adapts to all body shapes and sizes and all sleeping styles. This is particularly useful for couples as each side adapts differently to each partner. A look at the extraordinary number of 5-star reviews confirms that our customers report a better sleep experience, night after night and that makes us very happy.

In conversation with the Key Executives

Why was the company set up? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?
Leesa was co-founded by David Wolfe and Jamie Diamonstein. Today’s traditional mattress purchase experience is filled with marketing gimmicks and sales tactics that create confusion and unnecessary mark-ups. David and Jamie knew that by combining their skillsets in both the mattress industry and direct-to-consumer products, they could build a better mattress and a different kind of company that would disrupt the old, tired ways and inefficiencies inherent in the traditional industry.

Tell us about your first product that was launched.
The Leesa mattress was the result of hundreds of hours of design, testing iteration and is the product of 30+ years of mattress-building expertise. We designed Leesa with a universal adaptive feel to meet the needs of almost everybody. Since we launched in 2014, the Leesa mattress has become the preferred mattress of tens of thousands of satisfied sleepers and is the most well reviewed by several mattress industry experts.

The Leesa mattress has three layers of premium foam delivering cooling bounce, contouring press relief and core support. The perforated Avena foam top layer was designed specifically to allow constant airflow throughout the night for a cooler night’s sleep. The memory foam middle layer provides the contouring and pressure relief that has made memory foam so popular. And the dense core support foam provides strength, durability and structure to the mattress. Our distinctive, iconic cover is woven from a single piece of polyester-lycra blend fabric featuring Leesa’s 4-stripes. Leesa is 100% made in America, offers free shipping 100-night risk free in-home trial and hassle-free returns.

What kind of mixed responses have you received from your consumers over the years. How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?
Consumer feedback is crucial to Leesa’s success and continually shapes our product and experience strategy. We are constantly receiving feedback on the Leesa mattress and tweaking our FAQs, site content and customer experience workflows to ensure everyone gets all the information they need to setup and enjoy their Leesa mattress.

Overwhelmingly positive feedback around how soft and comfortable the Leesa mattress cover is ultimately compelled us to create and launch the Leesa blanket.

Learning that, despite our 100-night risk-free trial, there are still many customers who simple will not buy a mattress without feeling it first, we pushed to open an experiential retail concept.

And knowing that there is a large percentage of mattress shoppers who still seek out innerspring mattresses, we chose to address that market by designing a premium-quality hybrid mattress brand called Sapira by Leesa, which combines premium pocket springs for support with memory foam for contouring and pressure relief.

What challenges did you face in your initial years? What can your peers learn from it?
As a challenger brand, we had to leverage more non-traditional, guerilla-style marketing tactics to gain scale by gaining influence in the social media space and blogosphere.

Meet the Executive Duo

David Wolfe, Co-Founder & CEO: David is driven by his passion for his family, his friends, and his work and a deep-set sense of purpose. He expects a lot of himself and of others, which has been the driving force behind his success. David would say simply that he’s been lucky to work with great people doing what he loves. He has helped bring new ideas to life, from his early days as a strategy consultant to the start of his entrepreneurial journey more than twenty years ago. David has successfully built and sold companies and has also been on the investment committee of a private equity firm for 16 years.

Jamie Diamonstein, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer: When Jamie serendipitously ran into David in a restaurant in November 2013 he was in his 28th year of working for, and eventually running his family’s 3rd generation mattress business. His passion for product design and development and a lifetime of designing mattresses mean that Jamie is responsible for literally millions of nights of sleep for hundreds of thousands of Americans. He has long believed that the future of the mattress industry was in direct-to-consumer marketing and technology and a traditional family mattress business was not the place to make it happen. At Leesa, Jamie spends his days (and nights) dreaming up mattress and other sleep product ideas that offer better and more affordable sleep solutions than anything on the market today.