Why did Casper sue a mattress blogger? A closer look reveals a secret, multimillion-dollar battle to get you into bed.
One day in the spring of 2016 I mentioned to a friend that I needed a new mattress. Mine was a sunken hand-me-down that had become about as comfortable as concrete.
“I know a guy who can give you a free mattress,” my friend said.
This sounded too good to be believed, but my friend protested it was true: “This guy Kenny, he reviews mattresses online, and companies just send them to him. He can’t get rid of them fast enough.” Not long after came the email introduction: “David, meet Kenny.”
Journalists aren’t supposed to accept freebies. But the one thing I was certain of was that I would never write an article about online mattress reviewing, a subject so self-evidently boring that I became a little sad just imagining it. So when Kenny replied that he expected to have a mattress to offload soon, I only asked him what sort of wine he liked.
Kenny Kline turned out to live just blocks from me in Brooklyn, and I walked over a few days later with a nice bottle of red under one arm. Kenny buzzed me in and I stepped inside the entryway, where I found a queen-size mattress already waiting for me, ready to grab and go if I pleased. But I wanted to give Kenny his wine.
I called up to Kenny, and he emerged from his apartment to greet me on the stairs. He was tall and good-looking, with a kind of programmer affability. Later I’d learn he had studied physics and finance at Washington University in St. Louis, where he rowed crew and was a Beta Theta Phi brother. I’d also look up some of his mattress reviewing videos.
I asked Kenny about his unusual hobby, figuring that reviewing mattresses was something he did for beer money. But he surprised me by saying that this was what he and his business partner, a guy named Joe Auer, did for a living; their two websites, Mattress Clarity and Slumber Sage, were exclusively dedicated to reviewing mattresses.
Kenny told me that in the last few years, numerous mattress reviewing websites had sprung up. Then he made a strangely implausible claim: Just a few days before, the mattress e-commerce company Casper had sued three bloggers–competitors of Kenny’s–whose reviews Casper didn’t like. Kenny and his business partner, fortunately, had been spared.
I called an Uber and hauled my free mattress up to my third-floor walk-up apartment. The mattress had a poufy marshmallow top that I didn’t quite love, but you get what you pay for. I got used to it as the months went by.

I might have forgotten about Casper’s rumored lawsuits altogether, if the mattress brand hadn’t kept following me everywhere I went. That summer and through the fall, Casper ads sprouted all over New York: beautiful ads, often lining subway cars, featuring cartoon creatures curled up together on mattresses. In Casper’s cartoons, even the big bad wolf slept peacefully next to three little pigs.

In October I wrote Kenny to ask what became of those lawsuits. “One of the bloggers just publicized it,” Kenny wrote back, providing a link to a website, Sleepopolis.com.
In February 2015, Derek quit his day job to focus on Sleepopolis.
It was a smart gamble. In the months and years that followed, Derek would build his site into the most-trafficked web destination for people seeking information on mattresses, beating out a raft of competitors. In total, his YouTube reviews have garnered 2.5 million views, while the site itself would grow to attract over half a million visits every month. If you happened to search for mattress reviews online in the last three years, odds are you landed on Sleepopolis. Derek built his site into the number-one Google hit for countless popular queries related to mattresses.
Our phone call taught me a great Mattress Dealers about this strange backwater of the internet economy. But a mystery remained. Throughout those first, heady months, Derek maintained a good relationship with Casper. How, then, by late 2016, had it gone so sour?
I asked Derek, but he couldn’t tell me. With Casper’s lawsuit against him pending, Derek’s lawyer forbade him from even mentioning the company by name. I would have to dive into a growing stack of mattress lawsuits to find out.
[ Source : https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars ]