You most likely have seen this product by now. You probably have seen them called “pillow slides” or “cloud slides”. Just a couple of days ago Good House Keeping had an article showcasing the top 10 best pillow slides.
Here is a graph showing the monthly search volume for the term “pillow slides” over the past 10 months:
As you can see, in November of last year, there was next to no search volume for this product. Then it quickly exploded to being searched 40,000 to 50,000 times a month.
There are many sellers on Amazon for this product. However, a few have created a DTC (direct to consumer) brand for this product: Pillow Slides, Sootheez, and Cloud Slides.
You can find this exact product on Alibaba for about $2 per pair. The average selling price on these websites I have seen is about $30 per pair.
I took a look behind the curtain on Pillow Slides (www.pillowslides.com) business:
The Numbers
Between September 10th and September 29th, Pillow Slides received 2,720 orders. On average, that is 143 orders per day.
Pillow Slides is a single sku website. They only sell these sandals for about $30. They do have an upsell post-purchase to try to get you to purchase a second pair for a discounted price. Some may purchase more than one pair at a time, but my guess is 90% of their orders are for one pair.
With all that being said, I will use $30 as their average order size (yes some purchase more than one but they also ship out free orders for replacements and samples).
143 orders per day with an average order size of about $30 gives them an average daily revenue of about $4,300. In September, I estimate they will generate about $125K of revenue (a yearly run rate of $1.5M).
Traffic
Similar Web estimates their monthly website traffic to be about 62,000 total monthly visits (their competitor Sootheez receives about 50,000 total monthly visits).
Paid Search
Here are the top 5 paid search terms for Pillow Slides:
- pillow sandals
- pillow slides slippers
- pillow slides
- pillow slides shoes
- pillow slide slippers amazon
Facebook Ads
Currently, Pillow Slides has 61 active ads on Facebook. However, they have not launched a new ad since April 2021.
See Pillow Slides Facebook Ads
Pillow Slides has 50.5K followers on Instagram. In September, they posted 59 times and were tagged 82 times.
Here is their audience demographics:
TikTok
Pillow Slides only has 2K followers on TikTok; however, they advertise heavily on the platform.
Here is one of their ads:
This ad has been used in multiple campaigns:
7/16 Campaign – 29.1K views
7/18 Campaign – 1.1M views
7/23 Campaign – 244.3K views
7/27 Campaign – 107K views
8/24 Campaign – 334.2K views
9/6 Campaign – 276.9K views
They have also had other video ads do hundreds of thousands of views as well.
Post Purchase Email
5 Days after my first purchase I received this email:
Subject Line: “Your Refund is Waiting”
I found this to be an interesting way to incentivize people to share Pillow Slides and provide Pillow Slides user-generated content. You are sent to a simple JotForm to fill out and submit your images(s)
Ride The Wave While You Can
Pillow Slides are clearly hot right now. It reminds me a little bit of the weighted blanket wave of 2017/2018. Pillow Slides appears to have entered the game fairly early. As you can see, a ton of competition has entered the market. Having a yearly revenue run rate of $1.5M is not too bad; however, this will not last forever. My bet is they will see their market share erode over the next 6-12 months. They will either have to launch new products to the audience they currently have, or they will have to shut down this operation and move on to an entirely new product.
