Hi there,
Welcome to the 16th edition of "State of anew sleep".
Every month I share snippets of what I (and the team) at anew sleep are working on.
Here's what happened.
Optimizing returns
In the beginning, when we launched anew sleep, we had notoriously high return rates. This was largely due to our "101 nights free returns" policy.
Basically, you could:
1) Order a weighted blanket
2) Use it for 100 nights
3) Return it for free
4) Get all your money back
That's one strong offer. Perhaps also the reason it didn't take us more than about 70 days to reach 1.000.000 DKK in revenue.
But one thing was for sure: this wasn't the best we could do. We slowly started to optimize different aspects of the return process.
First, we removed the free return. Did it harm our conversion rate?
No, not really.
Next, we made a bold move by reducing the return window from 101 to 30 days. Our data indicated that one-third of all returns were made after 30 days. The question was: would people just rush to return everything before the 30-day deadline, or would we actually see fewer returns overall?
Turns out, our return rate dropped by one-third after implementing this change.
We've done over 10 initiatives to reduce our return rate. Everything from changing the words we communicate to our clients to after-sales service emails.
Comparing our return data from April 2024 to April 2025:
We are down by over 60%.
This month, we talked with some return platforms that promise to help reduce the time spent managing returns and let brands keep more money by optimizing the return flow.
We talked with three different platforms and decided to go with Reversio.
It's still super early days and I don't have any data to share here yet. But once I do, I'll give an update on our return strategy and the numbers.
Launch of new products (the prep)
When launching new products, it's always a huge time and money sink.
We have to:
- Create a winning product (takes months)
- Ship it from Asia (takes months)
- Create great content (takes weeks)
- Create landing pages (takes days)
- Create beautiful PDP pictures (costs money)
- Create email campaigns (takes hours)
All to reveal for a brief moment:
Will this product fly? ✈️
Or will it fail?
When working with heavy or bulky products, it's always a huge risk to launch new products. You can't really fly a ton of products and test the waters.
You have to ship by sea and that takes 45-60 days.
Now when you factor in production time and time on sea, it can take 3-5 months from when you place the order till you have it in hand.
Because you know you'll be waiting, you also don't want to launch a new winning product and go sold out, so you're tempted to buy a larger stock.
But what if it doesn't sell...
See the dilemma?
Currently, we're working on two product lines simultaneously.
✅ We have created the products.
⛔️ We have one ready in our warehouse (the other one is shipping).
✅ We're almost done with content creation (thanks to PL).
⛔️ We're working on the landing pages.
⛔️ We're waiting for the PDP pictures (outsourced them).
⛔️ We're doing the emails at the end.
I can't wait to launch the new products as it's going to be a great determining factor of whether we hit our goal this year.
Our goal is simple if you missed it from a previous update:
Double the revenue
and
Increase ROAS by 10%.
I know it's ambitious, especially when we are two founders working less than 5 hours a week on the business. But currently we're up 15% YoY on the ROAS and seem to be on the right track with the revenue as well.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading so far. I will be doing this every month. If there's something specific you want to hear about in these updates: shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
See you in a month.
