Ricky Joshi bootstrapped Saatva to $200 million in revenue with minimal overhead before ever taking outside money — and he's seen conversion rates run 80% higher in markets where the brand has a physical store versus digital-only. He breaks down the showrooms that double as customer service hubs, some generating $10 million a year, and the unit-economics discipline that early constraints forced on the business.
Behind the Expert
Ricky Joshi co-founded Saatva in 2011 after a detour through the ad agency world, where running paid search for e-commerce clients gave him a front-row view of the category before he ever sold a product himself. The idea for Saatva came almost by accident: he went to pitch a furniture retailer, Jennifer Furniture, run by Ron — who'd become his co-founder — on marketing help, and left instead with Ron's idea to build something new in the mattress category. A look at the incumbents' thin, catalog-era websites convinced him there was room to do it differently, and he called a third co-founder, Chris, that same night. Saatva stayed bootstrapped until a 2018 private equity round — at one point running close to $200 million in revenue with a 14-person e-commerce team, a fraction of the headcount well-funded rivals like Casper threw at the same problem. Today Saatva operates more than 30 physical "viewing rooms" across the country, including the Austin flagship where this conversation was recorded, with 15 more planned for next year.
The Quick Hits
- Stores function as regional marketing anchors, not standalone P&Ls: in markets where Saatva has a physical location, conversion rate runs about 80% higher across phone, web, and in-person — which changes what local media spend is justified, not just what a store itself sells.
- Saatva stayed unfunded until a 2018 private equity round, and Joshi credits that constraint — not a deliberate strategy — for the company's discipline. Near $200 million in revenue, the e-commerce team was 14 people, versus a comparable competitor running a couple hundred employees to do the same work.
- Retail locations double as customer service centers. Saatva found its remote CS reps outperformed a centralized call center, so it folded service into stores instead — reps who've physically handled the product convert and serve better, and some individual viewing rooms clear $10 million a year.
- Site selection runs on four-wall economics and regional lift, not headline rent — Columbus, Ohio isn't necessarily cheaper than parts of LA, and traffic-heavy retail corridors have outperformed both lone standalone stores and downtown commuter districts.
- Reviews and earned content, not SEO tactics, are why Saatva shows up in AI search results today. Joshi treats it as the byproduct of a decade of "just doing good things" rather than a distinct AI-visibility initiative.
- AI is genuinely useful in layers — customer service suggested responses, coding, daily decision support — but full cross-system integration is blocked by siloed data and imperfect APIs, which Joshi is candid isn't solved yet, anywhere.
- Saatva deliberately waits out hype cycles (Google Glass, the metaverse, voice commands) before adopting new technology, applying the same filter to AI: real value once proven, no chasing shiny objects on momentum alone.
An agency kid who stumbled into mattresses
Joshi's path to Saatva ran through a self-started ad agency, not a design or manufacturing background. Running paid search for e-commerce clients made him curious about the category firsthand. The turn came almost by accident: he went to pitch a furniture retailer, Jennifer Furniture, run by Ron — who would become his co-founder — on marketing help, and left instead with Ron's pitch to build something new in the mattress category. A look at incumbent mattress websites confirmed the opportunity: thin on value, thin on storytelling, still catalog-era. That night he called a third co-founder, Chris, and Saatva was underway.
Building a brand before "direct-to-consumer" was a word
Saatva launched in 2011, years before "DTC" entered the vocabulary — Joshi says the term didn't really stick until around 2017 or 2018, and before that he struggled to explain what kind of company Saatva even was. There were almost no peers to learn from; he cites Bonobos, founded several years earlier, as roughly the only other brand attempting anything similar. Rather than digitizing a catalog, Saatva spent its first three years selling a single product and going deep on it — explanation, detail, video, and an early bet on in-home trials — treating the website itself as the storytelling vehicle for the brand rather than just a transaction layer.
Staying disciplined while competitors raised and spent
During the so-called mattress wars, well-funded rivals like Casper spent aggressively on billboards, taxi wraps, and subway takeovers. Saatva didn't — not out of caution, Joshi says, but because it never raised venture capital and took on no outside capital until a 2018 private equity round. Being self-funded forced the business to be cash-flow positive from early on, which he credits as the real source of Saatva's operating discipline, more than any deliberate strategy.
The "viewing room": retail as an extension of the website, not a replacement for it
Saatva didn't open its first physical location until 2019 — eight years after launch — and even then resisted calling it a store. Every location is a "viewing room," built to mirror the website rather than exist as a separate channel: the same product pages sit beside every bed, the same imagery covers the walls. The timing carried real risk — Saatva's first store, 3,300 square feet in New York City, opened just months before COVID — but performed well anyway, reinforcing that customers still wanted to touch and feel the product even as physical retail was widely being written off.
Turning stores into customer service hubs
One of Saatva's clearer operating discoveries: its customer service reps performed better working remotely than clustered in a single call center, which made a centralized CS operation feel unnecessary. Rather than staff a dedicated facility, Saatva folded customer service into its retail locations. Store employees split time between handling calls and helping in-person shoppers, giving reps direct, physical familiarity with the product they're selling over the phone.
The real payoff: stores as regional marketing anchors
The clearest number Joshi cites is the one behind this episode's title: in markets where Saatva has a physical location, conversion rate runs about 80% higher than in digital-only markets, across phone, web, and in-person. That lift changes the marketing math for an entire region, not just for the store itself — it unlocks spend on tactics that wouldn't otherwise pencil out nationally, like local DirecTV buys, once a market's conversion rate justifies it. Store performance now functions as a leading indicator for the business: a newly opened Denver location landed in the company's top 10 by revenue in its first week, a signal Saatva reads as license to spend more in that market.
Picking locations on four-wall economics, not sticker price
Saatva's site-selection process runs on actual store economics rather than headline rent. Joshi's example: Columbus, Ohio isn't necessarily cheaper real estate than parts of Los Angeles, and New York City can, in some cases, be cheaper than Nashville — so evaluating cost per square foot in isolation misleads. The team instead underwrites four-wall revenue and payback period alongside a location's traffic pattern, which in practice has ruled out both isolated standalone stores and some downtown urban centers where office workers commute through without shopping.
Showing up in AI search wasn't a strategy — it was a decade of reviews
Asked about SEO, and later about AI search visibility, Joshi frames both as downstream of the same long-running habit rather than a distinct initiative: earn reviews, produce genuinely good content, and let the product carry the brand. He points to Google's own shift away from rewarding backlink-gaming toward rewarding real content as validation of an approach Saatva was already using — and treats AI answer engines crawling Reddit and review sites as an extension of the same dynamic.
AI in practice: real gains, real limits, no chasing shiny objects
Joshi describes Saatva's AI usage in layers: informing daily decisions, powering suggested responses in customer service, running throughout the tech team's own workflows, including code. What Saatva hasn't done — and doesn't think anyone has fully done — is integrate AI end-to-end across systems like logistics, where the blocker isn't ambition but data quality: siloed systems and imperfect APIs mean an AI layered across them can't yet be trusted to decide on its own. His broader filter, sharpened by watching Saatva sit out earlier hype cycles around Google Glass, the metaverse, and voice commands, is to wait for proof of value rather than adopt on momentum.
Sound Bites
- “At one point we were almost a $200 million company. It was like a 14-person e-comm team, and Casper was running around with a couple hundred employees doing the same work as less than 15 people.”
- “What we did is we actually made our retail locations customer service centers. Those employees are either on the phone operating as CSRs, or they're helping customers in person. It's helped the brand grow without being a huge cost center.”
- “Because I have a store in Austin, I can now address 100% of customers, whether it's in person, over the phone, or on the website — So we use our stores as marketing anchors. In fact, where we have a store, our conversion rate is about 80% higher.”
- “Columbus, Ohio is not necessarily cheaper than parts of LA. New York City might actually be cheaper than Nashville. So being smart about the actual economics of the store — we look at payback periods. Four-wall revenue is huge, and the overall lift within the region.”
- “The AI is going through Reddit, it's going through reviews, and it's crawling the Internet, and inadvertently Saatva is everywhere at this point. That's what our plan was all along: provide an exceptional experience, an exceptional product, and we love when people talk about us.”
- “There's nothing worse than an AI with bad data — you end up with a bad answer, the wrong answer, and that's absolutely not what you want. So we've always tried to be at the forefront, but we don't want to be too far ahead.”
The Chord take
Joshi's account complicates the standard e-commerce narrative in two ways. The first is about capital: Saatva's discipline wasn't a values statement, it was a structural consequence of staying unfunded until 2018 — a 14-person team running a business nearing $200 million in revenue while a well-capitalized competitor spent on billboards and headcount to do comparable work. That's a useful corrective for any team currently treating fundraising as a prerequisite for growth rather than a choice with real tradeoffs. The second, and sharper, point is about what a physical store is for. The instinct is to treat retail as its own P&L — a channel judged on its own revenue against its own rent. Saatva's 80% regional conversion lift argues that a store's real value shows up elsewhere: in the efficiency of every other channel operating in that market, phone and web included. That reframes the site-selection question from "can this location cover its rent" to "what does this location do to the market around it" — which is also why Saatva underwrites four-wall economics by actual local dynamics, rather than city-tier assumptions, and why store performance functions as a leading indicator for how much brand and local media spend a given market can support.
Put it to work
- 1Before signing a lease, don't just compare cost-per-square-foot across markets — model four-wall payback plus the regional conversion lift a store would create across phone and web before committing capital.
- 2If you already have a store in a market, test upweighting regional or local media there specifically — the elevated conversion rate can make channels that don't pencil out nationally profitable at the local level.
- 3Before building a dedicated call center, ask whether reps embedded in a physical retail location would outperform remote ones for a product customers need to touch or feel — Saatva's in-store reps convert and serve better than its remote ones did.
- 4Prioritize traffic-heavy retail corridors over affordable-but-isolated real estate, and be willing to walk away from downtown or commuter locations that don't convert, regardless of headline rent.
- 5Audit whether your reviews and earned content already cover the moments customers actually search — including in AI answer engines — and treat visibility there as the byproduct of a strong review base and genuine content, not a separate initiative to chase.
- 6Apply a "wait and see" filter to new AI tooling: don't adopt until you can point to a specific workflow gap it solves in your own stack, and be honest that full cross-system AI integration, blocked by siloed data, isn't ready yet for most teams.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Excited to be here, coming to you live from right outside the viewing room for Saatva, where I'm about to sit down with one of Saatva's co-founders, Ricky Joshi, who's going to tell me all about some of the secrets and lessons they learned along the way to creating a category-defining, iconic sleep company. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds behind what I like to call iconic — or next-to-be-iconic — brands. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Ricky Joshi, co-founder of Saatva Mattresses. Normally, Ricky, I'd ask you where I'm finding you today, but you were gracious enough to open up your doors and host us here in Austin at one of your flagship stores. So this is a wonderful place to be recording a podcast and having a conversation with you. So yeah, thanks a bunch.
Ricky Joshi
Yeah, happy to be here and excited to do it in the store. A great way to kind of, I guess, bring it all together.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it feels great — it feels like we're sort of in your living room having a natural conversation. We had a little bit of a warm-up before, and I think you've got a really fascinating background — it'll be interesting to dive in here. Tell me a little bit about yourself. So the brand's been around since 2011, but you've been involved in commerce since before that, so it's kind of one of the OGs, a little bit like me. So yeah — what brought you to Saatva, and where have you come from?
Ricky Joshi
Started off in the ad agency world — realized pretty quickly that I didn't want to be working for other people. I think that, like a lot of other founders, I started my own ad agency and realized I'd basically just created a job for myself. I started dabbling with e-commerce as a practice within the agency — doing AdWords on behalf of e-commerce brands — and then really started to think, what can we do? Inadvertently, I met my co-founder Ron, who was running a company called Jennifer Furniture at the time. Pretty interesting — I actually went to pitch Ron on how I could help improve Jennifer, and he came back to me and said, actually, I want to get into the mattress category. I went home and thought, this is interesting. And I looked at the websites of our competitors, or would-be competitors — very old school, not a lot of value, not much more interesting an experience. And I thought, hey, this is actually a real opportunity — there's a chance to do something really interesting and disruptive. I called our other co-founder, Chris, that night and said, I think we should do this. When we started Saatva, the idea was pretty simple: we wanted to reinvent the mattress category by bringing an incredibly high-quality, good-for-you product to the consumer. And that's how we started, and we haven't stopped since.
Bryan Mahoney
I love the good-for-the-consumer angle — I think that's fascinating. We didn't talk about this before, but my background is also agency — it's an incredible school to ultimately get into this. We started in the late '90s, and it was kind of the same thing — I remember even before e-commerce, this idea of catalog commerce, and these websites were pretty nascent in how they explained products, but then ultimately customers would have to go into a store. So I imagine when you were doing some of that research, it must have been the late 2000s, 2010s — there couldn't have been too many wonderful examples. I mean, direct-to-consumer wasn't even a thing yet. Trip down memory lane — what were you looking at, by the way?
Ricky Joshi
I'm so glad someone came up with the word direct-to-consumer. I think that might have happened around 2017 or '18, because I was always trying to explain what kind of brand we were — and weren't, any traditional e-commerce company — and it was always difficult to enter the zeitgeist in a way that was easy to explain. I guess direct-to-consumer really stuck. What's interesting is there weren't a lot of brands to piggyback off of — Bonobos is probably the only one.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, they're like 2012 vintage, I think.
Ricky Joshi
No, no — earlier, 2006, 2007. So they're probably the original, but still a bit of a catalog sort of experience. I think one thing we did that's really unique is we built a really immersive experience around one product — we only had one product from 2011 until 2014. So really getting deep into what that product is — explaining it, getting into details, showing videos, all of those things. We were one of the first brands to ever do that, one of the first to offer an in-home trial. There are a lot of brands out there that have done an amazing job, but I think what's fun about this is we were very early — inventing, in a way, the whole direct-to-consumer retail revolution — and using...
Bryan Mahoney
...the channel the right way. I don't use the term "iconic brand" cheaply. If you think about the first move into e-commerce, it was sort of, how do I make this catalog available to customers online — but it wasn't necessarily accretive to the brand. But when I think about the way — you brought up Bonobos — it was, how do we introduce the brand to the consumer? How do we make them part of the purchase, part of the brand? Brand storytelling — it seems to me that was a really big part of what it took to launch Saatva. And the reason you're still around 14 or 15 years later, the reason we're sitting in this beautiful showroom, is because you didn't just create a catalog experience — you created a brand by leveraging the channel. So, given the opportunity to do it again — what would you do the same, what would you do differently?
Ricky Joshi
I think at the end of the day, where we are today is such a great place. I love the way the brand looks and feels. I love the way everything — from our physical retail experience, to the way we run customer service, to the way our web experience works — has evolved over the years. But if I had to go back in time, I would have probably done PR a little earlier. We were doing a lot of innovative things really early on, and I think we let some other brands come in — particularly in our category — and own the innovation piece of it, basically stamp themselves as the originators of the category. It's been a bit of a tortoise-and-hare run — they came in, sprinted, and flailed out a little bit, and we've just kept pressing and doing all the right things for a very long time. So again, I think we're in an amazing place and wouldn't trade where we are, but there are a couple of things I would tweak.
Bryan Mahoney
You touched on that when I first came in — this notion that there was a moment in time, the mattress wars, and yet you all remained quite disciplined. There was obviously a focus on the product, not just how do I acquire customers faster and cheaper, how do I make sure the brand is resonating and we're meeting customers where they are. What are some lessons you learned along the way about staying disciplined when there was a bunch of capital available to acquire customers? How do you build the habits that get you to where you are today?
Ricky Joshi
Quite frankly — not raising venture capital. There were times I wished we had. I'd see Casper and some of our competitors running around raising tons of money, putting themselves all over billboards in New York City, taxi cabs, subways, for years — "aren't you just like Casper?" It still happens, but the reality is, because we never did that and were bootstrapped until 2018, when we did a private equity round, we had to be a cash-flow-positive business, and it made us disciplined. Natively, our founding team is also just geared that way — I'm a scrappy founder, for better or worse; I've always been an entrepreneur, or at least had an entrepreneurial mindset. So just throwing money around never really made a lot of sense to me. I've always believed in unit economics — you have to make something work at a small scale to make it happen at a bigger scale. That created this data-driven discipline where we had a relatively small team here in Austin on the e-comm side. At one point we were almost a $200 million company with a 14-person e-comm team, while Casper was running around with a couple hundred employees doing the same work as less than 15 people. That discipline has been part of our DNA from the beginning. Now, as we've grown, we're spending money on brand awareness, investing in areas that are a little less performance-driven, less innately ROI-driven — but at this point in our history, it makes sense, because we have the scale, we're big enough, we have the stores, so we can start to do those things. But discipline is still a very core part of our DNA.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that — it's like the Force. Discipline, from not raising venture dollars, instills these really good habits. But it doesn't mean you're not making big bets — I look at this retail presence, and this is clearly a big bet. I want to come back to the performance piece too, because there's a lot to unpack there and you're definitely one of the experts in the space. But staying in retail for a second — the brand launched officially in 2011, digitally native, direct-to-consumer only. When was the first foray into retail?
Ricky Joshi
Retail took us a while — it happened in 2019, our first store in New York City. 3,300 square feet. Big bet — and then right as that happens, COVID strikes, four months later. New York City wasn't exactly an easy place to be handling COVID, but at the end of the day, the store did fantastic. We're entrepreneurial — I think that's something that's really important, data-driven and methodical, but entrepreneurial, and making those big bets is critical. We realized, number one, the store was working fantastically well; number two, there are so many customers who still want to touch and feel the product; and who we are as a brand, as an ethos, translates really well to retail. So it was actually an amazing time to make some bets — rents were low, people were thinking physical retail was over. What an awesome time to go in and sign a bunch of leases, with great deals and great locations — which was really powerful, because it cemented us in great locations: Newbury Street in Boston, one of our earliest stores, 14th and R in DC, WeHo Melrose in LA — D2C alley. You get anchor tenants anchored, and then everything else becomes easy from there, because we were doing phenomenally well in these places. Great time to make a bet, and it worked.
Bryan Mahoney
But this isn't just a store — what's the term we use for it?
Ricky Joshi
This is a viewing room.
Bryan Mahoney
A viewing room — help me understand how you were thinking about retail differently. Is it fair to say that even back in 2019, you didn't say, okay, we're going to open a store, we're going to have a retail footprint — were you already thinking about the in-real-life experience as its own brand pillar?
Ricky Joshi
We really wanted the store to be an extension of our web experience — a seamless experience between the two. In fact, our web experience sits next to every single bed — you can walk around, and right there, that bed will be featured and focused on. The seamlessness between retail and our web experience is very unique and different, I think. I don't think there's a store out there that, when you come into physical retail, feels like such an embodiment of the website — you look at the walls, and it's the same imagery. That was really important from a customer service perspective too. We also realized early on that our customer service employees were actually outperforming when they worked from home, and that having a bunch of CS employees in one dedicated place wasn't as important as people thought. So what we did is we actually made our retail locations customer service centers. As the brand's grown, there's buzz in the store, and those employees are either on the phone operating as CSRs or helping customers in person. It's helped the brand grow without being a huge cost center — retail's been kind of an anchor.
Bryan Mahoney
I think it's that willingness to do things a little differently — maybe rooted in the discipline. You didn't reinvent a tech stack for the mobile stands sitting beside the mattresses, and now the furniture — it's an extension of the website, it just works. I think it's perhaps counterintuitive to have a CX team sitting within the retail store, but it brings that human presence. The ability to capitalize on the assets you have feels like a really big part of the brand you've built.
Ricky Joshi
100%. It just feels so integrated, and it works. Having customer service in-store isn't only cost effective, it makes better reps, because they're dealing with the product physically — so when they're on the phone, they can say, hey, by the way, check out your nearest store, and I'm touching it right now, this is how it feels.
Bryan Mahoney
And it's got to be really neat if I'm helping customers out — to be able to watch real customers walking around, touching and feeling the product, to really be immersed in it. That feels empowering.
Ricky Joshi
100% — and our customer service reps who are in-store perform better than the ones who aren't.
Bryan Mahoney
It's nice to be able to give them a place to go to work, too.
Ricky Joshi
100% — and it anchors community. Every store is its own little community because of that, because we have more employees there.
Bryan Mahoney
It was one of my favorite parts, and I still look back on the glossier days really fondly — the retail experience that brand was able to deliver, so much of that was community-driven. The customers lining up outside or in the store were really creating the sense of community, and if you worked there, you were part of that community too. When you ask people about the feeling they have with a brand, so much of it is: do you love the product? Yes. But do I love every aspect of every touchpoint of that brand? That really matters. Okay, so retail — you waited seven-plus years before doing it. For anyone running a brand who's listening right now, who's thinking about opening up retail — maybe they're exclusively digital right now, or even exclusively wholesale — what advice would you give them about finding that first place, that anchor store, that anchor community center? When would you say is the right time to do it?
Ricky Joshi
I think when you have critical mass in a geography and feel like — people do want to touch and feel the product, and there's an opportunity to raise your profile within that geography. Each store actually is a marketing anchor for its region. Because I have a store in Austin, I can now address 100% of customers, whether in person, over the phone, or on the website — I'm more efficient in Austin, my conversion rate is higher, which means I can spend more in Austin. So we use our stores as marketing anchors — integrating retail and marketing that way, I think, is really special. It lets us do stuff we wouldn't normally do, like local DirecTV, which might be a little more expensive but starts to make sense when you have a higher conversion rate. In fact, where we have a store, our conversion rate is about 80% higher. That's a pretty big stat. Beyond that, follow the revenue — the first ten or fifteen stores are easy, it was pretty natural for us to see where they'd go. And I'd say it's also important to look at conversion rate. There are certain places — Denver, for instance. It took us a long time to get into Denver, and we finally have a store there — out of the gate, in its first week, I think it was a top-10 store, which never happens. We know our conversion rate in Denver is through the roof, and we're happy to cater to that. The other thing that's really interesting is thinking through who your customer is. We've found that being in retail corridors with real traffic is a lot more effective than being a lone store out in the middle of nowhere, or even sometimes in downtown urban centers — people go to work and go home, but they're not necessarily shopping when they're downtown. So we've shifted away from that strategy, outside of New York City and some of the more residential urban centers.
Bryan Mahoney
I didn't set you up for the segue, but you kind of brought me to it — you're throwing out terms like conversion rate, and I've heard you talk a lot about MER, about North Star metrics you're looking at today to help identify if a market's working, if a store's working. What are your North Star metrics, or what advice would you give other operators — what really matters, what should they be looking at?
Ricky Joshi
Honestly, four-wall numbers still mean a lot — if we're producing within four walls, that's important. The cost of the real estate matters too, and that can't be overlooked. One thing that's interesting to me as we've built this out: Columbus, Ohio isn't necessarily cheaper than parts of LA — New York City might actually be cheaper than Nashville. So being really smart about the actual economics of the store matters. As I mentioned, we're a disciplined brand — we look at everything, we look at payback periods. Four-wall revenue is huge, and then just the overall lift within the region. I think a lot of retailers do look at that, but we've seen a tremendous increase where we do have a store.
Bryan Mahoney
So how did the move to retail affect how data-focused you all were — is it the same data stack? You now just have more data. How did it affect the way you think about spend? We talked about performance before — knowing exactly where a customer came from, exactly how much they cost, and being able to predict their revenue with the brand over the next couple of years. But now, with these stores, when you think about the investment and the geographical lift, do you measure that differently? Are you allocating spend more holistically around brand, and shifting focus away from pure performance-based marketing?
Ricky Joshi
Overall, as a brand, we've shifted — as we've built out more of a retail footprint and our conversion rate has increased across the country, we've been able to diversify. Brand lift is something we felt was our moment to lean into — we're an Olympic sponsor, for example, we're doing national television. Friends will call me up and say they saw us in an NFL game — that's got to feel good, right? That's stuff we wouldn't have done five years ago. But the brand's hit that zenith where we can do those things, and because we have a high conversion rate, because we have 30 stores, we know it'll be effective from a cost perspective. We've always had one foot in, one foot out — scale up in this direction, then scale up in that direction — so our brand-awareness efforts have coincided with our store expansion, pretty much in sync. We're still embarking on another 15 stores next year. Our stores are producing some of the highest square-foot dollars in retail — I think our top store will clear $10 million; that's the viewing room in Paramus, New Jersey. I love that viewing room, it's doing great. All over the country, we've just seen some fantastic numbers.
Bryan Mahoney
So it's these strategic bets — you're measuring it, seeing where you're getting results, and then pouring more fuel on the fire.
Ricky Joshi
Yeah, and then we'll spend more. Once we see performance in a local area — the minute we get a viewing room into a market, it allows us to spend more in that market.
Bryan Mahoney
Have you found that the grass is greener on the marketing martech side of things, new technology — or do the challenges exist regardless of whether you've achieved a certain amount of scale, or you're just starting off?
Ricky Joshi
It's interesting — I think in some ways it's so much easier today to start an e-commerce or direct-to-consumer brand. Shopify's made it incredibly easy and cost-effective to launch great web experiences. Klaviyo's made it easy to have seamless, integrated email marketing. There's so much more technology and tools — back when we started, in 2011, there were far fewer choices, and the choices were expensive. It took forever to implement, massive legacy systems — now we're living in a much leaner, faster world, which is fantastic. The marketing challenges are still there, but we're doing a great job with them with the newer tools. Overall, I'd say it's much easier on parts of martech, web and e-comm — but it's as challenging, or similar, on just pure marketing.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah — marketing is still marketing.
Ricky Joshi
Eyeballs are still marketing.
Bryan Mahoney
Eyeballs have never been more expensive.
Ricky Joshi
Exactly.
Bryan Mahoney
Never been more distracted.
Ricky Joshi
100%. That hasn't become easier at all.
Bryan Mahoney
Speaking of marketing and reaching people, and how fast you can go — I had a ton of fun reading through some of the reviews on the Saatva site. It's clear your customers love you. And as I started doing some SEO searching, I started to see you all everywhere — that content, which is hard-earned and takes time, is showing up. I'd imagine that's been an important part of your SEO strategy. I waited about 30 minutes for us to actually talk about AI, but I'm curious how those hard-earned results from reviews have been part of the success story — authentically, because people love the product — and how that's actually helped you get ready for the next wave everyone's excited about: agentic commerce.
Ricky Joshi
What's so interesting is I remember a long time ago, Google shifted a bit, and gaming SEO became less important than just providing a lot of great content.
Bryan Mahoney
And we brought in all those hidden pages — it never felt right...
Ricky Joshi
Burying all these things — we just produced backlinking strategies and this and that, and I think Google really cleaned up its act about ten years ago and basically said, just do good things and it'll work out. We were already doing those things — we've been doing them for a very long time. AI is just another level of that. The AI is going through Reddit, going through reviews, crawling the internet, and inadvertently, Saatva is everywhere at this point — with good intention. That's what our plan was all along: provide an exceptional experience, an exceptional product, and we love when people talk about us. For that reason, AI has actually been an incredible asset in a lot of ways. We show up, and I think we show up very well — it's kind of funny, I'm on AI all the time, and when you actually type in, "what mattress should I buy," we show up all the time.
Bryan Mahoney
And yet I'm still a purist, and maybe romantic about commerce — the experience of it. Any time a brand is creating a product I'm going to put in or on my body, I really want to know the brand behind it. I'm not prepared to delegate the entirety of the responsibility to an agent to go buy that product for me. I'm happy if it helps with the research, but then I want to do that last-mile piece myself. So I wonder if that's because you've cemented that reputation and have that following — I wonder if that's a really good path for you guys, in terms of leaning into agentic commerce, where it's not that I'm looking for a mattress and the agent does it all for me, and suddenly the white-glove Saatva service shows up at my door having found that mattress for me.
Ricky Joshi
I think we've been doing what we've been doing for such a long time, and doing it exceptionally well. We love when our customers review us, when they comment on our Facebook remarketing — we love all of it. We're heavily reviewed. If someone wants to test our mattress, we send it. So that strategy continues to work for us, but we also want to be technologically forward. If the world is changing, we're not going to become an antiquated brand — that's the best thing about this. This is a company that's still entrepreneurial by nature and will always want to stay ahead. We're never going to fall by the wayside because we didn't keep up.
Bryan Mahoney
But it's clear you're not cutting corners either, and I think that's really important. How do you leverage technology to deliver a better experience to your customer, leverage data to bring you closer to them — as opposed to it being a race to the bottom, just trying to acquire them more cheaply? I actually want to establish a relationship with you, because you're going to spend — if someone buys one of these mattresses, they're spending a meaningful amount of their life sleeping on it. Having that trust in the brand is really important.
Ricky Joshi
It's so critical — critical to past purchases, critical to people buying other things from us. They like to hear from us. The catalog's expanded considerably — you can see it, I'm sitting on one right now. People really have a lot of trust in the brand, and in the brand's ability to provide an exceptional product in every category we play in. When people buy their second, third, fourth, fifth mattress, they buy from us. We're hardly an impulse buy — we're a curated purchase, and we want to be part of someone's purchasing habits for a long time. We feel that we really do produce a great product, and I think that's one other thing I really want to emphasize: the product speaks for itself, in every role I've ever had at Saatva, whether leading marketing or strategy or whatever. It was always easy, because the product was always so great — and that's something that differentiates us from almost any competitor we have.
Bryan Mahoney
That's my whole talk track for what it means to be an iconic brand — there's no such thing as an iconic brand without a wonderful product behind it. Customers are too smart nowadays for that, and it's clear being here that you all subscribe to that theory too. So we touched on AI a bit — you're sort of accidentally taking advantage of the fact that your content is great. What about intentional use of AI within the team? I know you're not as hands-on, but it feels like your hands are in a lot of these things — when you look around the team and the tools you're using, have you been surprised by how effective it's been, or perhaps slightly disillusioned by a bunch of promise that hasn't necessarily been fulfilled?
Ricky Joshi
I think what's really interesting about AI is that there are all different levels of usage. There's AI that helps you inform decisions and work better on a daily basis — we're 100% doing that. AI is part of our customer service experience, with suggested responses. It's part of our tech stack — our tech teams are using it throughout, writing code, and even strategically, when we're making decisions, AI responses are something we'll at least consider. But there's another level of AI we haven't implemented, which is integrating AI into your entire system — helping run everything from logistics to various other pieces. That's interesting, and we talk about it, but it's something that just hasn't happened yet for us. We have a lot of different things going on, and it's just a massive undertaking to do all at once.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it requires a complete reimagination. I think when you've invested as much as you have in your brand ethos and the data you have, making sure every one of these AI components has access to that — so it understands, in whatever department, how to get access to that brand DNA — is really important. I call it context, and that's hard. A lot of these systems are operating on siloed data — they're really good at a certain job, but how do you make them amazing at all of the jobs talking to each other?
Ricky Joshi
And I don't think we're there yet, in terms of the APIs being sent out from the existing systems we're using. If the data isn't perfect, and there isn't a pure balance back and forth with the AI, it won't figure it out. There's nothing worse than an AI with bad data — you end up with a bad answer, the wrong answer, and that's absolutely not what you want. So we've always tried to be at the forefront, but we don't want to be too far ahead. In the history of the company, there have been so many different technological products thrown at us — a lot of them maybe not related to backend or marketing — Google Glasses, the metaverse, voice commands, it goes on and on. We've always said, we're going to take a wait-and-see approach, and if we find it valuable, we'll get into it — but we're not going to jump in at every single shiny new object. AI definitely isn't a shiny new object — I 100% believe it's going to change the way we do everything. I just don't think it's there yet, because of the data issues we discussed.
Bryan Mahoney
More people need to be talking about this, because when I talk to different brand leaders, there's this feeling that everyone else has it figured out, and they don't — because parts of it are actually hard. You see the promise right away, you work with it, give it a decent amount of context, and it gives you immediate value. The answers for CX are infinitely better, but you still have someone doing the last-mile delivery or the quality check on it. I think that's one of the things I appreciate about these conversations — people are honest. Yeah, we're experimenting, parts have delivered immediate value, other parts are really hard, and we're going to figure it out. I think it's comforting for people to hear that — if you get a bunch of leaders around a table, they're like, oh yeah, us too, that's hard. It's hard, it's hard, we're going to get there, but it's not—
Ricky Joshi
It's not an overnight thing.
Bryan Mahoney
No, definitely not an overnight thing. All right, cool — I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. I'd love to ask you a couple of rapid-fire questions, a little more fun and easy. I walked up and down this street — this is D2C alley. What's one D2C brand, or even not necessarily D2C, that you look to today and think, they're really doing it right? Who do you find super interesting today?
Ricky Joshi
For the history of time, I've always found Warby Parker to honestly be an exceptional brand — I'm sure you get that answer a lot.
Bryan Mahoney
No — first time.
Ricky Joshi
Oh, really? Amazing. I think they do a fantastic job integrating retail and web — they're probably the closest to a totally integrated brand, where the web experience and physical retail are just so interconnected. Now that I'm so heavily involved with omnichannel and store creation and expansion, I think they just pick the best retail locations. We love where they are, for the most part — I think sometimes they overstretch, but they're a public company, they have a lot of stretching to do, and for the most part I think they do a really great job.
Bryan Mahoney
Great answer — seamless tech too. The other day, one of my dogs ate my glasses. I got glasses for the first time — I'll be nearly 50, and I made it this far.
Ricky Joshi
You're a young 50. Thanks.
Bryan Mahoney
I fell in love with them — they helped me read, they're great, and my dog ate them, and I was quite sad. I went on the website and they had my prescription, they had the reorder — I didn't know they were going to have it, but I kind of expected it from the brand, and it just delivered. I could have just as easily sent it to a store and walked in and picked it up there. So I think that's a great answer, and I love the integration angle.
Ricky Joshi
Absolutely. I think the ability to execute across channel, in every capacity of the business — to be relatively streamlined from a technology perspective, and to have the marketing and branding also do a really good job with physical retail — that's something we do really well. I think we do everything we touch well; I always say we're a top-notch team that does a really good job in a lot of different areas. None of this is easy — you can't just be good at one thing, you have to be good at lots of things. I've always felt the well-rounded student was underrated — everyone says you have to be a specialist versus being really good at one thing. I think in e-commerce you have to be good at a lot of things. Warby does a great job at a lot of things, and I think we do too.
Bryan Mahoney
Very wise words — you've got to be great at a lot of things to build a great brand and be great at e-commerce. Ricky, thank you so much for hosting us here today, and for being a wonderful guest.
Ricky Joshi
Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Appreciated it. Thanks.