Casper's sales fall despite record interest in its mattresses (it needs to get vertical)

Googling: "How long can human go on 4 hours sleep"... Don't worry, Casper's right there with ya. The direct-to-consumer mattress company was a unicorn before it went public back in February. Now its valuation has dropped from $1.1B to just over $250M (quarter-corn?). Casper lost more sleep yesterday when its stock plunged 14% after earnings.

• Casper's sales fell 3%, even though time spent in bed probably increased 1,000% (#work-from-bed). And it's still dreaming of profit. Buuut...
• Casper saw record website traffic last quarter, pointing to record interest in its mattresses. People were browsing Casper.com to upgrade their takeout-in-bed game.

Sounds counterintuitive.... But it makes sense. Casper's sales fail wasn't due to weak demand, but to weak supply. Many mattresses were out-of-stock for weeks at a time, meaning Casper couldn't ship out enough to meet demand. Casper blamed supply chain challenges like fabric and foam chemical shortages. It should really blame its lack of vertical integration:

• Vertical integration is when a company owns multiple stages of production in its supply chain. Apple just got more vertically integrated by ditching Intel to put its own Apple-made chips in Macs.