Following in the footsteps of pastry shops, restaurants and accessories brands, mono-product websites offering online purchase and home delivery are now flourishing in the French mattress market. The main players are French Tediber, British Eve Mattress, German Bruno and American Casper. Let’s look at what Google thinks of these brands and to what extent they are disrupting this slightly sleepy market.
As outlined in this article by French website Journal Du Net, the French mattress market is subject to volatile prices. It is easy to negotiate a 20 – 40% discount in shop with prices ranging from €50 to €3,000 and no real transparency.
Ikea has occupied a key position in the market since the 1980s and Matelson (Camif) has pioneered a 100% online offer, but new players are now bringing a “low-cost” approach:
- 100% online distribution
- Mono-product to maximize economies of scale
- Time-limited stock
- Vacuum-wrapped products in transportable cardboard boxes
Different levels of brand awareness in France
Take a peek at the total volume of searches for the different mattress brand names:
It is difficult to ascertain the search intentions behind the brand names e.g. someone searching for Eve may want to know the origins of this first name, Casper is a well-known friendly ghost and Bruno is also a first name. Only Tediber is a unique brand name (except for the cuddly soft toys, albeit with a slightly different spelling).
To analyze brand notoriety, we therefore need to consider expressions like “eve mattress”.
When we look more closely at the keywords, Eve takes the lead, although Tediber has also developed its notoriety with less investment (1.8 M€ raised in 2016) than its British competitor (13.4M€ since launching).
Big volumes for generic keywords
The keyword “mattress” gets 74,000 searches each month, followed by “cheap mattress” with 18,100 searches; while the keyword “Mattress” combined with “90X190”, “140X190”, and “memory foam”gets 12,100 monthly searches. “Futon mattress”, “children’s mattress” and “foam mattress” also get plenty of hits.
Cdiscount, Conforama, and But – local French discount websites or furniture shops, share the top spots for “mattress”.
Organic traffic & number of keywords for Tediber and Eve Mattress
With SEMrush data, we can clearly see that Eve Mattress is one step ahead when it comes to organic traffic, which can be largely attributed to its brand notoriety (navigational keywords) and not to generic keywords, as we can see in the below ranking data.
Current ranking for generic keywords for Tediber and Eve Matelas in France
Tediber is No.1 for “online mattresses” (170 monthly searches) and No.3 for “French mattresses” (720 monthly searches), which guarantees a minimum level of qualified traffic, but competition is fierce for bigger volume keywords.
Eve Mattress doesn’t fare much better than Tediber: the keywords it ranks highly for aren’t very useful for the acquisition of new clients (e.g. mattress test).
Tediber beats its competitor when it comes to SEO, but Eve Mattress benefits from more notoriety, which generates more overall organic traffic.
Who do you think will win over the market? Don’t hesitate to share your views in the comments below! In the meantime, a couple of mattress-related thoughts to keep you entertained:
If you’ve glanced at the ads for Simba, Eve or Casper, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were flogging some kind of new gadget. They have the aesthetic of tech startups everywhere…
Someone’s going to lose their Tempur!
The key to the concept? Fast, optimized logistics: compact vacuum-packed mattresses rolled up into cardboard boxes from just 30cm to 45cm wide and 95cm – 180cm high. The result? 24-hour delivery including 1.5-hour courier delivery in big cities.
