Mike It Up

For any operation (brick and mortar retail, department store or online) purporting to sell a product on which we spend one third of our lives, the Mike It Up podcast, a value-added offshoot of the GoodBed independent mattress review website should be a mandatory listen/watch. GoodBed founder, Mike Magnuson, and colleague and friend, Jeff Cassidy, or Cass as he’s sometimes called, dive deeply into data to analyze and discuss the behavior of mattress buyers. On Mike-It-Up, Magnuson and Cass, perform a friendly and entertaining bob and weave—the shaved-headed CEO from California, the five o’clock shadow-sporting “coaxer” from Massachusetts—when they unpack for the retailer information and insights gleaned from, for example, studies conducted by the Better Sleep Council. Sometimes Magnuson’s straight man, other times challenging his assertions, Cass confesses in one breath to the podcast’s biggest fans: their moms, and in the next wrangles the conversation back to say retailers’ prospective sales incentives based on knowing more about what happens to discarded mattresses. These mattress data geeks arm retailers with useful informational tools they would otherwise spend weeks or months sorting through personally. As a mattress-buying commercial real estate investor, I find the Mike It Up podcast enormously intriguing. I would not have otherwise known that sales of coil spring mattresses were on the wane. Consumer or retailer, it’s safe to say that Magnuson’s and Cassidy’s informative parry and thrust holds the keys to the kingdom of nod.