The fastest-growing start-up in Europe has been identified and—surprise, surprise—it’s a bed-in-a-box company.
Tech and reporting companies Ayden and The Next Web (TNW) made the declaration at their fifth annual Tech5 Competition celebration dinner earlier this week. The yearly match-up sees hundreds of brands from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain and Sweden vying to be crowned as the queen supreme of the European start-up world.
This year, the winner was Emma, a German-based mattress retailer founded in 2015 as the answer to the bed-in-box trend in the United States. To emerge victorious, Emma, along with all the other businesses that finished in the top ten, had to provide verified growth rate information to Ayden and TNW along with signed affidavits confirming their validity. Once all this information was compiled, it was revealed that the mattress company saw a revenue increase of 14,315%, making it the clear front-runner.
Emma currently features three different mattresses in its line-up: the flagship Emma One, the three-foam-layer Emma Original and the premium Emma Air built with special ventilated technology. These beds (starting out at just €290) are only available in Germany and the UK.
MATTRESS START-UPS ON THE RISE
Over the past decade, direct to consumer bedding companies have seen a ton of growth in the start-up sphere. In fact, some of the fastest-growing companies on the US online-only market these days are mattress brands (Casper, Tuft & Needle, Purple and Leesa immediately come to mind, though there are of course dozens more that also fit the bill).
So what’s with all this lightning-fast growth? Some attribute it to the low, low costs of buying and shipping things online. A few point to the transparency of working with a company that makes all its own beds. And still others think it might have something to do with the kinds of playful advertisements that only a digital brand could get away with.
Here at Sleepopolis, we think it comes down to something simpler: a growing awareness of the importance of a good night’s rest. One of the most important things the bed-in-a-box boom has done has made us all more cognizant of not only how we sleep, but how we can sleep better and turn our eight hours of shut-eye into something truly restorative.
And as the trend spreads from the US to Canada, the UK, Germany, India and beyond, it’s clear that it won’t be stopping anytime soon.
Featured image provided courtesy of Emma’s Instagram.