Interview: How Eve Sleep boss Cheryl Calverley is sweetening investors’ dreams

On a particularly wet day in June, Eve Sleep chief executive Cheryl Calverley arrives to breakfast by bicycle.

Despite her soaked trousers, Calverley’s positivity is undeniable as, over eggs royale and a flat white, she explains how she came to lead the only sleep wellness brand in the UK.

After completing a degree in psychology at Goldsmiths, Calverley began her career in marketing at FMCG giant Unilever, before moving to Birds Eye where she held various marketing roles for five years. It was then Calverley made the decision to move into direct to consumer. 

“I realised if I didn’t get out of FMCG, I’d forever be fighting with Tesco and that wasn’t something I wanted,” she explains.

Calverley moved to the AA, but found that as marketing director she was “writing an awful lot of PowerPoints” and bringing little of value.

This is where Eve Sleep came in – a “young, nimble brand” that needed a new strategy after over-exposing itself geographically and making a string of losses.

Calverley explains that her studies also helped her lead on Eve Sleep’s strategic pivot away from selling mattresses to selling a good night’s sleep.

“Being a psychologist, I like psycho/biological stuff – food, sleep, exercise, stuff where mind and body come together,” she says.

After two years as chief marketing officer, Calverley took the helm of Eve Sleep in May 2020, simultaneously guiding the business through the pandemic and its rebuilding strategy.

Eve Sleep is now set to exceed revenue expectations as the business benefited from the homewares boom and increased consumer interest in wellness during the pandemic, alongside Calverley’s moves to focus on core markets and quirky marketing schemes.

In its most recent update, Eve Sleep registered £25.2m in revenues for the full year ended December 31, while its EBITDA losses were cut by 81% to £2m.

For the coming year, Eve Sleep expects to return to profitable growth, while also investing in its core markets of the UK, France and Ireland.

Navigating the pandemic

“It’s very difficult because I’ve not taken the reins in any other environment, so I can’t tell you if it’s any more or less weird,” says Calverley when asked what it was like taking the top job during the pandemic.

Calverley replaced former chief executive James Sturrock last year as the company sought the next phase of its growth plan. While Calverley may have the senior title, she is not your typical retail leader.

“I’m quite entrepreneurial and I prefer smaller, more nimble businesses – I’m not terribly corporate,” she says.

“I’m quite entrepreneurial and I prefer smaller, more nimble businesses – I’m not terribly corporate” 

“I’m quite an extroverted thinker, I like to work with people and talk to people; that feeds me and I’m also quite a present leader. I like to stand up and give talks. That’s been quite hard and we’ve had to work hard as a business to maintain presence in people’s lives.”

With the world working from home for the past year, Calverley says she struggled to maintain Eve Sleep’s culture and worried her staff would feel they “could have been working for anyone”.

“You come to work for a business like Eve Sleep for the culture and development, and the opportunity to be with people you like being with to build something you want to build, rather than for the pay or the career path or more formal stuff,” she explains.

“When you take some of that away, it can feel a bit empty and pointless. I think that’s probably been the hardest thing for me, because it’s probably one of my strong suits – my natural ability to go ’right everyone, let’s go down to the pub’.”

Start-ups like Eve Sleep thrive on being “unsettled”, Calverley says – and what is more unsettled than a global pandemic?

“The business is at its absolute best when everything changes,” she adds.

Going forward, Calverley is a huge advocate for improving mental health at work, shunning the nine-to-five paradigm in favour of a model where if everyone gets their work done by its deadline, they can do it whenever suits them best. Calverley, for one, often takes meetings while riding her horse. 

She has also worked hard to create a company culture where mistakes are not only acceptable, but a necessary part of the business, especially when working remotely.

“One thing I’ve been working really hard with the team on, is the culture of being able to make mistakes and talking about them,” she says.

“Remotely, that’s even harder, because you make a mistake and you’ve got to just close your laptop and be left on your own thinking about what’s happened and how people might be judging you. We’ve been working on openness and honesty about dropping balls, because without the willingness to do that, the business can’t grow.”

While Eve Sleep has indeed made mistakes, its rebuilding strategy and the favourable home and DIY market has made it a Covid winner.

Sleeping better

“What stops you from sleeping?” Calverley asks. “Is it your mattress, the room temperature or your own thoughts?”

Controversially for a business known for its mattresses, Calverley sees mattresses as the least important element when it comes to getting a good night’s sleep.

This is why Eve Sleep has now repositioned itself as a sleep wellness brand, offering a holistic range of products to help customers sleep better.

Eve Sleep has made the move into beds, bedding, accessories and wellness products, including CBD oil – a move that saw its share price jump back in February when it announced a partnership with CBD products distributor Sana Lifestyle.

Partnerships with Next and Habitat have also helped boost Eve Sleep’s reputation in the UK, setting it apart from competitors such as Emma and Simba.

The business has a bricks-and-mortar presence in 27 partner stores and concessions in the UK, while its wellness products are stocked across Boots stores.

Eve Sleep initially began as a pureplay business, but Calverley believes in being where the consumers want to shop – getting Eve Sleep products in front of customers in order to grow the brand awareness and equity.

By focusing on different routes to market, Calverley believes each of the DTC mattress brands that proliferated around 2015 have found themselves a niche in which they can exist alongside one another – with Eve Sleep firmly in the tech/sleep wellness space.

With a background in marketing, it’s also no wonder that Eve Sleep under Calverley’s leadership has turned around its marketing strategy – the dancing sloth has now emerged as the company’s mascot, where customers are encouraged to “wake up dancing”. 

By focusing on how you feel when you’ve slept well, Eve Sleep turns the traditional mattress and bedding messaging on its head.

Similarly in its French market, the adverts focus on “la vie en jaune”, or “life in yellow” – where life is happier with a better night’s sleep.

Calverley believes each of the DTC mattress brands have found themselves a niche in which they can exist alongside one another – with Eve Sleep firmly in the tech/sleep wellness space

Also in keeping with its mission to help the nation sleep better, Eve Sleep brought back “test card F” – a symbol that older consumers would recognise as it used to appear when television programming finished for the night.

With customers now engaging with content across multiple channels and devices, Eve Sleep runs adverts across terrestrial television with Channel 4, its streaming service All4 and on popular mobile games such as Candy Crush and Farm Heroes. The ads go live at 11pm to tell customers to switch off and go to bed.

Part of Eve Sleep’s issues in previous years were its overexposure to multiple markets. Both Sturrock and now Calverley have reined that in and focused on key markets in the UK, Ireland and France.

The retailer now has a 68-strong team of UK staff, down from 90 when Calverley joined the business in 2018, as well as a one-man team in France.

While the UK business still has some way to go until the rebuild strategy comes entirely to fruition, Calverley says Eve Sleep’s focus is now turning to France where the market is “much more immature” – both in terms of DTC and ecommerce.

For that reason, Eve Sleep’s strategy of forming retail partnerships with household names such as Olivier Desforges will help on its growth trajectory.

With her as the driving force behind the company, the sleep wellness element is bound to grow – soon Calverley will have us all asking “what stops you sleeping and how can Eve Sleep help?”