How d-to-c bedding brand Boll & Branch is moving beyond the thread count

Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Stitcher. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend! There’s a common misconception when it comes to sheets that threadcount is all that matters. Scott Tannen, a veteran marketer who founded Boll & Branch, a bedding brand, five years ago, wants to tell you otherwise. Speaking on the latest episode of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast, Tannen explains that high thread counts, something consumers have been trained for years to covet, are basically meaningless. “Thread count is more of a measure of how dense and thick the fabric is—it has nothing to do with how comfortable or how soft the product is going to be,” Tannen says. “That boils down to the quality of the material.” Tannen works alongside his wife, Missy, a co-founder of the company who handles the creative aspects of the brand. The sheets, which are sourced from India in a supply chain the husband-and-wife team control, are less expensive than their designer counterparts. A set of sheets at the d-to-c brand costs around $200, a fraction of the $1,400 of some higher labels. Like many other d-to-c brands, Boll & Branch has benefited by eliminating the middleman from the retail equation, passing on that value to the customer. “Suppliers are making more money and the customer is paying less money because we’ve been able to suck all of these archaic elements out of the supply chain,” Tannen says. And with a recent $100 million investment from L. Catterton, the private equity fund behind other brands such as the Honest Co. and Peloton and Boll & Branch’s first outside investor, Tannen intends to accelerate growth. “Availability and access is the next hurdle—that’s where you’re going to see us really focus over the next months and years,” he says. He’s also planning to double U.S. production in the next year as one of the brand’s sustainable impact goals. “That’s a big lift, but we’re going to do it.”

How d-to-c bedding brand Boll & Branch is moving beyond the thread count

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