All genders allowed □ A foam couch brought all us nasty motherfuckers together □.”) When people resell their used Nuggets in groups, they often make sure to note it was “not used after dark”. (The group’s description reads “Not for the easily offended. One promising sign about the future of the company is the existence of a 16,000-strong Facebook group called Nugget After Dark for discussion about using the foam cushions as adult furniture. “That’s what makes it hard to plan.” They’ll be opening a backorder later in November for anyone willing to wait into 2021 to get a couch. “We’ve sold Nuggets for anywhere between five to seven days this year - that’s how many days it was actually available for sale on our site,” Baron said. They plan to ramp up production to make 750,000 next year - over $170 million in couch sales alone (additional covers are sold separately). They have a new warehouse facility in Butner, North Carolina, with around 80 employees paid a minimum of $15 an hour with healthcare (employees were paid throughout the shutdown this spring). “It was a failure of our imagination,” Baron said.īy the end of the year, Nugget will have shipped and sold approximately 150,000 couches, a number that they know has not kept up with demand. Yes, it slowed production and ramped up the demand, but ultimately they failed to predict the exponential demand. “It’s always been that people loved our product and people wanted our product when we would sell out, but it's never been before this level of emotion.īaron is quick to point out that they can’t claim that COVID caused all their backorder problems. “There’s a few different emotional things, and we can feel it,” she said. When COVID hit, they were finally shipping out the last of the backorders they had taken just before Christmas 2019.įussell believes that the pandemic has fueled that response. They moved to a bigger facility and started to hire staff, but the demand kept outpacing their projections. Running out by Christmas would continue to be a pattern, even as they increased their output each year. Only Baron himself could work this contraption, so the number of units they could ship was constrained by how late he could stay up. The kind of air compressor machine capable of this is very expensive, so for the first few years, Baron DIY’d a version using cinder blocks to weigh down on the foam to smush it. Like a Casper mattress, Nuggets are compressed so they can ship in a reasonable-size box. Several Nugget-owning moms told BuzzFeed News that Blake’s stylish and colorful home was the first place they heard of Nugget.ĭuring the holiday season in 2017, Baron slept in their warehouse in Durham, working late into the night sending out orders by himself. The site Cup of Jo featured photos of the home of designer Stacey-Ann Blake, which included a reddish Nugget. Fussell sent free ones to parenting influencers, who posted about them on Instagram and blogs. She also suggested making the covers easier to remove and wash, remembering the lice outbreaks her classes kept having. She immediately made design changes: ditching the white zippers and dorm room color palette (the Kickstarter site from 2014 shows how the Nugget first looked in lime green, royal blue, red, and bubblegum pink). By then, Baron and Cocca had realized this should be marketed to kids, not frat houses.įussell quit teaching and joined Nugget. Hannah Fussell, Cocca’s girlfriend and a public school teacher, asked them for a Nugget for her classroom and saw how much her students loved it. In their Durham warehouse, Baron and Cocca would assemble the foam and fabric themselves, packaging and shipping out orders just the two of them. The fabric is woven in China and cut and sewn in El Salvador. Once Cocca graduated, they launched a Kickstarter that raised over $84,000 from under 400 would-be buyers.įoam pieces cut to specifications come from a supplier in North Carolina. He enlisted his friend Ryan Cocca, a journalism major, who already had his own shirt line and retail store in Chapel Hill.
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