Casper Sleep, the e-commerce mattress seller whose ads blanket the subway, is getting into bed with a new landlord.
The five-year-old startup signed a lease with Silverstein Properties to take 70,000 square feet at 3 World Trade Center, sources told The Real Deal. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the lease.
The new office will put Casper within short distance of the World Trade Center mall, home to one of the retailer’s two brick-and-mortar stores in Manhattan.
Silverstein leasing director Jeremy Moss said that some of the same features that made the World Trade Center an attractive location for Casper’s store – in particular, the access to transit – likely came into play when the company was choosing a new office location.
“Whether you’re a retailer or have an office where you’re trying to pull talent from lots of different neighborhoods, it serves both effectively,” he said.
The asking rent for the 15-year deal was around $80 per square foot. Casper will occupy the 39th and part of the 40th floors, and has “significant rights” to grow in the future, added Moss, who led negotiations along with an agency team at CBRE including Mary Ann Tighe, Stephen Siegel, Ken Meyerson, Adam Foster, Evan Haskell, Steve Eynon, David Caperna and Rob Hill.
CBRE brokers Sinclair Li, Dan Wilpon, Lauren Crowley Corrinet and Will Trotsky represented Casper.
The startup is currently headquartered at TF Cornerstone’s 230 Park Avenue South, where the company signed a five-year deal there in 2016 for just under 32,000 square feet, as TRD reported at the time.
The Casper spokesperson said the company has grown since then, and now occupies roughly the same amount of space it will be taking at Silverstein’s building.
Casper’s lease at Park Avenue South property is set to expire in 2021. But the company and another tenant at the building – communications firm Y&R – are leaving early after Discovery Inc. signed a deal in June to take most of the building’s 360,000 square feet.
Casper said it plans to make the move by the end of the summer.
The startup will join other tenants in the 2.5 million-square-foot tower that opened in June including advertising giant WPP, the upstart stock exchange platform IEX and McKinsey & Co.
The building is now 40 percent leased, per the landlord.