Gift guides are taking over again — gift ideas for him, gift ideas for her, and suggestions for every ultra-specific person in between seem to be everywhere you look. But one thing that’s often left until the last minute? The beloved stocking stuffer.
Whether you’re gifting on a budget, have a spending limit within your gifting circle, or need a tiny-but-expensive gift to add as a surprise, small stocking stuffers are a necessity.
But let’s be clear: Just because stocking stuffers need to be small in size doesn’t mean they should be dinky and worthless. Fake poop or an emergency clown nose are technically cheap and technically fit in a stocking, but we doubt anyone was dying to open those. Sure, it’s funny for a minute and you’ll be the class clown for the day, but you know it’ll end up in their junk drawer. Your friends and family will appreciate a Bluetooth tracker or wine stain remover way more.
We’ve asked around and done some research to pull together 50 of the best *useful* stocking stuffers out there. Some will be limited by price, some will be pricey but small enough to fit in a stocking, and some will be a mixture of both — while all will be sure to please.
A mini Bluetooth speaker
For music obsessives, going even a few hours without their current favorite album is basically a layer of hell. They’ll love you forever if you gift them a portable Bluetooth speaker from Bose: This waterproof one works exceptionally well outdoors for camping or beach trips, cutting through external noise to give impressively booming bass for such a little speaker. With a 6-hour battery, 30-foot range, and Google Assistant, they won’t have to go anywhere without music.
Hands On: This is the Apple Watch’s most important update yet
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Apple just upped its smartwatch game in a huge way.
The Apple Watch Series 3 is the biggest and most consequential update to date. By adding LTE connectivity, Apple has delivered an upgrade that will completely change how you use the device.
Earlier iterations of the Apple Watch, and frankly, most other smartwatches, have been hamstrung by their dependency on your phone for data. By completely untethering the watch from your iPhone, it’s not a completely different story.
Prior to today’s unveiling there was some speculation as to whether Apple would significantly change up the design with Series 3. Not only did Apple not change the form factor of its watch, they managed to keep the case size nearly identical even with the additional LTE radio and SIM.
Image: KARISSA BELL / Mashable
The only difference is that the case is now slightly thicker. The company says it’s the equivalent of about two sheets of paper — but it’s not noticeable that I could see.
The most noticeable difference is the red dot on the Digital Crown, which doesn’t actually do anything other than let people know you’re wearing the latest Apple Watch, which is, of course, the point.
Speaking of colors, the Series 3 also comes in a few new finishes: a new shade of pinkish gold and a gray ceramic. Both are nice, if somewhat predictable, additions.
The new gold finish.
Image: karissa Bell/mashable
Gray ceramic.
Image: karissa Bell/mashable
Naturally, there are a load of new band styles and colors to go with the new watches. The woven nylon bands now come in new patterns, and there’s a new sport band made of soft nylon that promises that is much more adjustable than the existing sport band.
New bands and colors aren’t why you’re going to want to upgrade your Apple Watch, though. You’re going to upgrade because LTE connectivity completely changes what you can do with it.
The new sport band is more adjustable so it can fit closer to your wrist.
Image: karisa Bell/mashable
Yes, you can send text messages and make phone calls from your wrist even when your iPhone is at home. But it also means you can ask Siri to call you an Uber or a Lyft, stream music, and use any other Apple Watch-enabled app.
All this comes with one important caveat, though: You’ll have to fork over extra money to your carrier each month for your watch. And even though carriers tend to charge significantly less for smartwatch data, handing even a little more money over to telecom companies just plain sucks.
If you can get past that, though, there are other reasons to upgrade.
The latest version of watchOS also comes with new fitness tracking features, like the ability to track high intensity interval training. There’s also a built-in altimeter, which allows the watch and watch apps to better track your elevations — a huge update for skiers and snowboarders.
There are also a load of upgrades to the heart rate monitor. Now, the watch’s heart rate monitor can track your heart rate over time and, when paired with the Health app on the iPhone, surface all your past heart rate data.
As Apple pointed out during its keynote, this has big implications for how people monitor their health, since they can better track changes in their heart rate over time.
Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/09/12/apple-watch-series-3-hands-on/
Human laziness is a market strategy for mattress and furniture startups
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The explosion of companies selling mattresses and other big-ticket items online is based on a clear gamble: You’re not going to want to have to return that giant thing, even if it’s free to do so.
It’s a bet that these companies are winning, even when items are returned.
“Some of our biggest promoters are actually people who’ve already returned their mattress,” said Aaron Bata, head of customer experience at Phoenix mattress startup Tuft & Needle. “Those are some of the people we find who are recommending us to their friends and family more than those who keep the mattress because they’ve gone through the returns process and they know how easy it is.”
Tuft & Needle is just one of a bevy of startups that have emerged in the past couple years to sell mattresses online. Any person who has listened to a podcast has probably heard the pitch: Ditch that nightmare “mattress showroom experience” and get your next bed stuffed in a mind-bogglingly small box in the mail.
The scale-tipping selling point? A months-long no-cost and ostensibly hassle-free trial period meant to put to rest any doubts you might have about sinking around $1,000 into something you’ve never even seen. If you don’t like it, the company takes it back and refunds all your money.
“‘Hey, try this mattress for four months.’ What a weird company!”
“Leesa gives you 100 nights to try your mattress for free. That is insane—that’s a third of a year” Comedy Bang Bang host Scott Aukerman says in one representative ad. “‘Hey, try this mattress for four months.’ What a weird company!”
That formula has allowed these bed-in-a-box startups to upend the traditional mattress industry, in which return and exchange fees of more than a hundred dollars were commonplace. Casper, Leesa, and at least half a dozen other companies are now operating with this model and it’s spread to similarly unwieldy items you might not otherwise think to buy online like sofas (Burrow and Joybird), bed frames (Pons), and flatpack furniture (Greycork).
But there’s a flip side to the promise at the heart of this new vision of home shopping: Returns are an expensive drag on bottom lines. There’s a reason that showrooms have always charged an exorbitant fee; they provide a buffer against hefty losses.
Returns are an inventory-wasting headache for any e-commerce business—they tend to be by far the biggest fulfillment cost on retail balance sheets—and especially intensive for those selling big-ticket items like sofas and beds that oftentimes can’t be resold, according to Forrester retail analyst Ananda Chakravarty
The new breed of online furniture retailers have to rely on the assumption that the overwhelming majority of customers won’t follow through with their return.
So far, they claim that’s working out.
“Returns are obviously a cost, but that’s something that has to be built in,” Bata said. “We think it’s going to be perfect for so many people—for the vast majority of people out there… But it’s not going to be perfect for everybody.”
Image: casper
But their marketing has to balance the confidence that people will like their product with reassurance that the refund will be easy and painless if they don’t.
“We don’t want to make people jump through a bunch of hoops,” he said. “It’s one of the most important parts of our relationship with our customers is being able to have that trust.”
Even so, perhaps an unspoken factor in the online furniture space’s success is that, however stellar the customer service, there will probably always be a few who see it as too much of a bother. In those cases, customers might opt to make do with a so-so product.
“People are reluctant to send back their mattresses because it’s a hassle.”
“Furniture probably has a lower return rate in general—people are reluctant to send back their mattresses because it’s a hassle,” Chakravarty said.
Of all the human characteristics to build a business around, laziness might be among the more consistent. Around three in five millennials admitted in a recent survey that they’ve kept items they disliked simply because they didn’t want to go through the trouble of returning them — around 18 percent more than shoppers over 30. That’s probably because nearly half of them say the returns they have made have been bad experiences, the report found.
“Retailers who want to remain competitive will find ways to reduce friction in the returns process, whether that’s communicating more updates, providing more transparency, or offering free return shipping,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail industry analyst who worked on the study.
Many retailers do just the opposite. Walmart-owned Jet.com tries to dissuade returns by offering customers a discount if they forfeit the right to send an item back upfront. Other stores discourage them with restocking, shipping, and processing fees.
Old-school mattress sellers are one of the worst offenders. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004 that most local and regional retailers barred returns altogether, and national chains made them frustrating and arduous with missed appointments, long waits, and fees of up to nearly $250.
Casper changed that. The startup took advantage of the blatantly consumer-hostile practice by touting an unprecedentedly returns-friendly model that doesn’t cost customers a dime.
“They pioneered the 100-day trial/return free that others in the category have tried to adopt,” said Michael Duda, a managing partner at venture firm Bullish Inc. who’s invested in Casper.
A Casper spokesperson declined to reveal any specific returns data beyond a claim that its rate is in the “low single digits.” But the co-founders have discussed in previous interviews how they keep the cost down.
In the case of a return, Casper arranges for a local church or charity like the Salvation Army to come to the customer’s home and take the product for donation. The loss is actually cheaper than shipping the mattress across the country and washing it for resale, the company’s chief creative officer told Inc. last year. Casper also gets a tax write-off out of the deal.
Image: casper
For some customers, those steps played out seamlessly and conveniently.
“It was super easy and they were very helpful,” said Amy Luo of San Francisco. “They asked why I was returning it, but other than that, they didn’t pressure me to keep it or anything, which was really nice.”
But other mattress buyers found the company decidedly less enthusiastic. John Geletka of Chicago said it took him “a few attempts by their third-party donation service and some complaining on Twitter” before he was able to lock down an appointment.
“It’s an awkward and messy experience,” he said of the grunt work of getting the mattress in and out of his home. “I think a lot of people would deal with a Casper because it’s not terrible for sleeping on in the center.”
Another customer claimed on Yelp that Casper wouldn’t send a mattress topper for free after the deadline because a representative said that was “only used to dissuade folks from returning it.” (For the record, the offer mentioned isn’t Casper’s current official policy). Someone else called the process “a big hassle.”
Then there were a few people who seem to have more or less resigned themselves to the mattress.
“It is now an enormous, gigantic, expensive paperweight,” said one customer who missed the deadline.
“It is now an enormous, gigantic, expensive paperweight”
In Casper’s defense, the number of testimonies claiming customer service was helpful and easy outweighed complaints like that. A Casper employee also responded to many of the negative reviews.
Bata claims Tuft & Needle has a return rate of around 5 percent, and its three physical galleries where customers can try mattresses out before having them shipped to their door all boast average reviews of 4.5 stars or higher on Yelp.
He said some of the incentive to discourage returns in the name of lower overhead is at least partially offset by the word-of-mouth marketing the company can earn from people who tried the product and decided it just wasn’t a good personal fit.
Even so, at least a few Yelp reviewers of the company claimed their returns didn’t go as advertised and the company wasn’t forthcoming in trying to coordinate a pick-up. But there were indeed rave reviews from people who ended up sending theirs back.
“This review is about how Tuft and Needle is blazing a trail to retail utopia,” one particularly enthusiastic refund recipient wrote. “They have managed to take virtually all of the risk out of a very difficult and confusing and expensive purchase.”
That reviewer probably meant that risk if gone for consumers, but it’s businesses that have figured out a way to make sure people aren’t returning stuff—but getting it in their homes before they can think twice. And it’s turning out to be a lucrative strategy.
Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/31/mattress-returns-gamble/