Daehee Park
I’m Daehee Park. I co-founded Boring Mattress and, before that, Tuft & Needle. I live in Phoenix, Arizona.
Tuft & Needle
JT Marino and I were classmates at Penn State, and in 2012 we were working together at a startup in Silicon Valley. Neither of us loved what we were building. So we put up a website to find out whether anyone would buy a mattress without lying on it first. We made our first sale in fifteen minutes, refunded it, and then started the company for real with about $6,000 of our own savings.
Tuft & Needle sold one universally comfortable mattress at an honest price, delivered to your door. That was the entire idea. When we started, “mattress in a box” wasn’t a category anyone had heard of. We were two years ahead of Casper and further ahead of Purple and Nectar, we never raised a dollar, and we stayed profitable the whole way to over $200 million in annual sales by 2018.
We merged with Serta Simmons Bedding that same year, and the business changed faster than any of us expected. Not just the products, but everything: how decisions got made, who made them, and what the company was for. The team that built Tuft & Needle was laid off or moved on. All eight of our retail stores closed.
Serta Simmons was owned by private equity, and it filed for bankruptcy in January 2023. I got to watch, from the inside, how private equity kills a company. Tuft & Needle still exists, but as a shadow of what it was.
Boring Mattress
I started Boring in January 2024 with Tyler Marino and Corben Leo. Tyler was our first employee at Tuft & Needle and ran product development for every sleep product we made. Corben is a renowned ethical hacker, and he brings an unconventional mindset to brand building and growth.
We started it because the direct-to-consumer mattress industry walked away from the promise it was built on. The brands that disrupted the category grew into sprawling product matrices and started inventing reasons to charge more, like diamond dust and green tea extract in the foam. Boring is the spiritual successor to what we set out to build in 2012. Simple, functional, affordable, made from materials that actually do something. One universally comfortable mattress, in a hybrid and an all-foam version.
I wrote about the decision here: Why I started Boring Mattress after Tuft & Needle.
My business philosophy
Stay profitable from day one. Never take money that demands an exit. Optimize for customers instead of investors.
I got to run that experiment for eight years, at a time when the standard advice was the opposite of all three, and it worked. Venture capital builds plenty of great companies. It just isn’t the right tool for the kind I want to build.
Press
- Forbes, 30 Under 30
- Retail Dive, Tuft & Needle founder launches Boring Mattress Co
- Modern Retail, Tuft & Needle founders go back to basics with Boring Mattress Co
- In Business Phoenix, Daehee Park, Waking Up the Sleep Industry