Most people never think about what’s inside their pillow. Kevin and Jin Chon did—and what they found was carpet-padding material. The brother and sister team, who grew up working in their Korean immigrant parents’ apparel manufacturing business, took that discovery and built Coop Sleep Goods into a nearly nine-figure brand over 13 years. Their approach defied conventional direct-to-consumer (DTC) wisdom: spend more on materials when everyone else cuts corners, stick with a single product for six years when expansion beckons, and trust that if the product is genuinely better, customers will do the marketing for you. Kevin and Jin break down how an obsession with what goes inside the pillow shaped every decision they’ve made—from supplier negotiations to channel strategy.
On cutting open a pillow and finding the real problem:
Kevin: A lot of what’s inside pillows is recycled materials: couch remnants that they shred up, leftover mattress foam, the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. It’s rainbow-colored. They use the same material for carpet padding. That’s why pillows are sewn shut—so you can’t look inside.
When we opened it up, we realized nobody knows this. And coming from our parents’ apparel business, where we grew up trimming and packing and understanding textiles, we looked at this and thought, If this is how the sausage is made, we can do better. A pillow is a rectangle. That part seemed easy. The harder part was understanding the feel side of things; it’s a totally different industry than fashion. But we were thinking as outsiders, and that ended up being the advantage.
On spending 10 times more on materials than the competition:
Kevin: We had to make the sacrifice of profit to make the product better. The fact that we were running a lean team allowed us to do that; all the savings went back into the product. We were using what’s called prime virgin foam, which is the highest grade. Everyone in the industry scoffed at us. They were like, “That’s such a waste of money—just use the scraps.”
It took us a couple of years to convince suppliers to come on board. They finally did as our volume increased and the unit economics got healthier. But even then, we kept reinvesting into better fabric, better liners. We iterated constantly. That’s what gave us the edge: We’re always product first.
We think about pricing like J.Crew. It’s accessible but still high quality. We could charge more, and we probably give up margin, but we want as many people as possible to actually get the product. If you price yourself out of reach, you’ve defeated the purpose.
On staying with one product for 6 years:
Kevin: There were moments where we were very tempted to dabble in other things. That’s the trigger as an entrepreneur—you see shiny objects. But we learned from fashion that if we’re going to do this, we have to build a brand, not a commodity.
We took the approach of going an inch wide and a mile deep versus an inch deep and a mile wide with a bunch of products that don’t really mean anything. We wanted to be the Kleenex of pillows. We were really patient, and I think that paid off.
Jin: We always leveraged customer reviews to do product research. People would say the pillow was too high or too low, and we thought, why can’t we just make it adjustable? That’s actually how the adjustable fill concept started. The focus was always: If the pillow is good, people will trust our brand and that will spread into other products.
On the “mom test” that sets their quality standard:
Jin: Our mom has a lung condition. You sleep on your pillow eight hours a night; your face is in it, on it, around it. If the quality wasn’t something we’d want our mom to sleep on, it wasn’t good enough for our customers.
That standard keeps everyone honest. It reminds the whole team how important it is to not skimp on the product. It’s not abstract. It’s personal.
On using customer reviews as an R&D engine:
Jin: Reviews are probably the cheapest and most scalable way of including customer feedback in your research and development process. These are people who already like your brand and want to help you make it better. They’re using and testing the product daily. For us to not listen would be foolish.
To this day, we read customer reviews. To this day, we bring things up in product meetings: “People are saying there’s this issue.” If we don’t address it and fix it, somebody else will come along and do it. This is the pathway to making the best possible product.
On word of mouth replacing a marketing budget:
Jin: One of the biggest ways we’ve grown is through word of mouth, which sounds strange in a digital ecommerce world. If someone tries our pillow and loves it, it becomes watercooler talk. They tell everyone they know. They buy one for their mom and their sister. We’ve had customers buy stacks of pillows as Christmas presents—which is kind of unusual, but it happens.
That growth has been organic. We’re not paying people to talk about us. It was legitimately like: Mary tried the pillow, loved it, bought three for her best friends who were new moms and needed good sleep. And it wasn’t an intentional marketing strategy. It was, How do we make the best product possible? Because that’s going to make Mary’s life better. And once Mary’s life got better, she told Jane. And then Jane told Susan. It becomes exponential.
Kevin: When we ask where people heard about us, most of the time it’s from family and friends. It’s shocking how much traffic we get through that. When you look at it, these customers have a zero-dollar acquisition cost.
On why they only sell through a few channels:
Jin: It’s really tempting to go anywhere and everywhere that will have you. But we focus on just a few channels. Big retail only opened up for us last year, because we wanted to protect our pricing and our brand.
The most profitable channel for us is Shopify—our DTC [direct to consumer]. We get to control the customer journey, tell more of our story, and engage with customers directly.
Kevin: The reason DTC is so valuable is the lifetime value. The email list, the ability to market new products when they launch, the average order value—on your own site, you can upsell accessories and complementary products. You get much higher AOV [average order value] and much higher LTV [lifetime value]. That’s the big lever.
On refusing to chase home runs:
Kevin: We had this opportunity to be on a very well-known entrepreneurial pitch show. We stopped everything else and focused all our resources on it; built this big bed where all the hosts were going to sit together with our logo on the back. They had us practice a dance, a jingle, outfits—we put everything into it.
And at the last minute, we’re on set, makeup on our faces, about to go on, and one of the producers says, “Sorry, you guys can’t go on.” We were so deflated. It just knocked the wind out of our sails.
The lesson was: Don’t build your business for home runs. Go for singles, doubles, triples. Build the foundation the right way, and the home runs come on their own. We also built a 140,000-square-foot logistics company on the side because we thought we needed better fulfillment. Great team, great facility—but it divided our focus and energy. Had we stayed focused solely on Coop, we would’ve been much further along.
Hear more from Kevin and Jin on Shopify Masters, including how they globetrotted to find manufacturers that met their standards, the influencer tiers that actually drive sales versus just reach, and why their merger with Comphy was the home run they didn’t have to swing for.
