>> Even if mattress retailers are making a fortune on margins, well you guys also have margins too. And a retail price of $299..to..$499-king tells me that your mattresses are very low end.
We of course have built-in margins on our products, and we try to keep it as fair as possible while supporting our operational overhead. But to write off our beds as "very low end" is a misinformed assumption. We have internal pricing of well known mattress brands that are considered high end by many and they have the same if not lower costs as ours (due to volume and manufacturing in Mexico/China).
>> It is just too thin. Less than half the thickness of a regular mattress.
We have a 10-inch model (double the thickness) coming out soon. The price won't be too much more than the 5-inch, while offering the same level of comfort. But to be honest, we've never had a return for it being too thin.
>> the fact that is made of foam only makes it worse as with that thickness it will unavoidable deform with usage
Our foam should last 5-7 years before there is any deformity/compression. We've done thorough cycle tests in a lab to test this.
>> Then there is the foam density, that I can't see anywhere in the specs. And as you can guess when you import materials the bigger the density the more expensive the foam sheets are.
The foam in our bed is roughly about 2 lbs in density. There is some variance as with any foam manufacturing process. Our foams are poured and crafted in California, and 3 different layers provide a blend in density that's proved to be comfortable and durable. To give a point of reference, Tempurpedic recently dropped below a 1.8 lb density base foam, and that is considered high end. They used to use 2 lb but they reduced it to increase their margins.
5-7 years doesn't seem like a particularly long time in the context of the life of a mattress. My (limited) understanding has always been that mattresses are the sort of thing many people hold onto for decades. In that context "it'll be good for five years" doesn't sound reassuring.
If you're positioning your product on price, you could make the counterargument that with your mattresses people could afford to replace them much more frequently than they typically do, of course. Just pointing out how this marketing point would strike me, if I were a potential customer.
We're not fans of holding onto mattresses for very long, of course we're biased on this; but, no matter what the material is you will develop body impressions and compression in the mattress. Be it synthetic materials or natural materials like cotton or wool. Compression can lead to degraded pressure point relief which can lead to spinal issues and discomfort.
Regarding the 5-7 years, if you look at a mattress that has a 10-25 year warranty closely you will notice that it is pro-rated. Meaning each year you own it, they will credit you less and less. This essentially breaks even somewhere around 5 years. Not to mention they make you jump through some serious hoops to prove it is damaged. We view this as a gimmick. So what we do is just provide a clean warranty at 5 years and exchange it if there are any problems. It may very well last longer but we felt at this point in time for our startup that we should stick to 5 years and evaluate whether we can extend beyond that.
Honestly, we want to see how customers will treat us when that time comes.
Thank you again for the feedback.
5-7 years is MTTF for just about every mattress in existence. I pitch mine after 5 years as is; Those things are dirty after 5 years of sleeping on the same surface every night.
We bought mattresses in the 'mid-range' ($500-600) and the springs went in the centre in 1-1.5 years. The best one we have had has been a refurbished mattress from the local charity store for $100.
We've got a European Sleepworks mattress that is likely to last a long time -- for the price, it should :-). When the time comes to replace it, I'll be buying from you.
"You get what you pay for" is an adage you will have to take into account when considering perceptions of your product by potential customers.
Whether correct or not, most people correlate price with quality such that a lower cost (to them) product is assumed to be of lower quality. Even those with an actual understanding of supply chains and intermediaries and their effect on pricing will do this, despite that knowledge.
If you believe them, it can be puzzling because you already know that customers have actually been more concerned with other things. Just keep going and don't pay too much attention to anyone except your customers and potential customers.
http://www.brookstone.com/tempur-pedic-tempur-simplicity-mat...
47 lbs / 22.22 cu. ft = 2.1 lbs
The weight listed is probably the shipping weight with packaging, so the actual weight of the foam is less. Seems like 8 lbs would be extremely dense.
of course. How can a business succeed without any margins ? The point they are making is that the margins are ridiculously high that these stores charge. They are claiming to reduce those margins.
"Here is how a cheap mattress is marked up"
I browsed through their website. They don't claim to be a luxury mattress and their point is more about a reasonable mattress for a reasonable price. Of course there never is a limit for how much you can pay for anything. Think a $15000 Honda Civic vs $100,000 BMW 7 series.
I think you are being a little too harsh in your criticism even though trying to be constructive. It may not be all marketing as Amazon reviews are pretty good. And Yes, Amazon reviews are definitely worth it (being an amazon prime member who orders at least 10-15 things a month).
I think that harshness prevented me from making clear the two points I was trying to make:
1. A warn that everything has its price. Some people will mark up expensive, some people will mark up way cheaper, but at the end there is normally no such thing as free lunch and on average you get what you pay for.
And more importantly,
2. That I believe that these guys made an awesome work around marketing. But not from a bad point but the opposite. A great website, great picutres, great pictures on Amazon too like for example showing the customer how the mattress looks like when folded and when shipped! Pretty infographics. Tons of facts about their mattress. Great choice of payments methods, etc..
The "you get what you pay for" point underscores the brilliance of Tuft and Needle's entrance into the market.
You must understand that there are industries, like mattress retailer, that have operated on artificially high margins for generations.
If you look at The company's competitive positioning you will see that they are vertically integrated, lean, and willing to blow apart the competition.
When 2 individual walk into the car dealership and separately buy an identical car. one pays full sticker, markup and a warranty. The other pays $100 over invoice. They both got the identical car; did they both get what they paid for?
I am impressed with the company's story and model. They are going to do well in the mattress business for a long time to come.
I bought a california king tempurpedic mattress from sharper image in 2003. It set me back about 1500 and at that time the other mattress manufacturers were not in the memory foam market. Today, the mattress performs impecibally.
The 5" is suitable because of their foam construction layering and density.
The real deal will be the price point on the 10" model
When you are buying mattresses from different brands, it's not the same product but with different label. There is thousands of variations. So basically it's like if your individual were looking to buy two different cars. And I don't think you believe a $10.000 car is the same as a $60.000 car even though the 60K one has way more margin for every stakeholder in the product chain.
And in this case I'm sorry to tell but it is even worse as it is like if they were selling a no-license car vs. a regular car.
And as it turns out, I had an undiagnosed sleep disorder at the time, so the mattress ended up helping with that too!
So I just wanted to say that, regardless of pricing, thanks for focusing on making a good mattress. It is probably kind of a thankless job, and/or it's not particularly glamorous, but it matters.
So do spring mattresses, by the way, and aren't they the most common type?
Personally I prefer spring mattresses over foam mattresses. They last much much longer as dangrossman commented, are more reliable and also much firmer. And also you can't leave aside the weather factor because spring mattresses are way more breathable than foam-only mattresses. We, for example, avoid selling foam-only mattresses to people that live on high humidity areas because there is a high chance they will return it with humidity stains.
Normally I would go for a pocket spring mattress ( I think that's the term in English for a mattress with individual sealed and padded springs ) with a decent amount of memory foam on the top. That way you get the firmness and breathability from a spring mattress plus the comfort of a nice soft memory foam layer.
On the firmess you're right, it is very variable. I've been myself sleeping on a foam-only sofa-bed mattress for almost a year and it is firm enough. The issue with latex or foam is that they distort with time. It is unavoidable. Depending on the quality of what you have bought that might be years but I've seen many poorly made mattresses that are returned within months.
It also depends on the weight of the people that is going to sleep as well. My wife would be worried if you were a customer insisting on buying a foam mattress and your weight as a couple were bigger than 180kg for example. Specially if it is a wide mattress as the weight would not be distributed evenly.
(I ended up buying 2 awesome, cheap, non-brand name, made in the US mattresses from Restonic, which are still going strong after 5+ years).
137 reviews: 124 5-star, 12 4-star, 1 1-star
383 reviews: 304 5-star, 43 4-star, 17 1-star
http://www.amazon.com/The-Twilight-Saga-White-Collection/dp/...
Mattress quality has a great deal to do with measuring their enjoyment of a mattress.
Good to know as next time I plan to buy a car I can go for an Honda Fit ( btw, no offense intended to any owner, just took it from a list of decent affordable US cars ) as everyone knows it will the same as a Tesla S but without the 1000x margin on top. As heck, Honda Fit's got 5-stars reviews on Amazon!!!
And yes, my car knowledge is rubbish to tell people that Honda Fit is low-end.
You seem to be a little critical of us, which is totally fine. We were really looking forward to show the HN community because we wanted everyone's feedback. Could you recommend another way we could represent our customer happiness to the public?
However I would be way less critical if you marketed your product as a futon/mat instead of a mattress, i.e. as what it is. And although I really like how you've done your website, your positioning and the whole simplistic approach I really think there is quite a bit deceptive advertising on your website. Like for example comparing a 5" futon with a $3K mattress in the infography, or the whole treatment of the mattress industry as like all mattresses out there are comparable to yours because as explained already in several posts.
But heck, if your customers are happy.... I probably would not change it at all. But I cannot avoid being critical with it.
We don't view thickness as a dependency of being called a mattress but that is certainly subjective.
Our 10" version is being released soon so maybe that may (or may not) earn some more credibility with people from the mattress industry, such as yourself and your wife. We were completely opposed to making a thicker bed but the reason we came to justify it was for people who have headboards and don't like the gap exposed above the mattress and the bottom of the board. Or for others who just want the look of something thicker. But comfort wise, it's completely identical to our current version and we'll be very clear about that.
We did thorough testing of mattress thickness and its correlation with comfort when we made our first prototypes. We've built mattresses from all natural cotton and wool, latex, memory foam to what we have now and just could not see any data pointing to it being directly related.
I'd also like to point out that we don't have much support from people who work or have friends in this industry for obvious reasons but that's the path we've chosen.
Well, those numbers are quite distant from what I know from working with several factories, not in the US but I cannot imagine the difference to be very high in production costs. There is quite a vast difference from the cost of making a cheap mattress and an expensive one. We buy mattresses from factories that might cost us $100 and others that cost us $800. Between them there is tons of other models. Put there the factory margin which these days is much much lower than it used to be and gives you a factory cost.
So your numbers, I don't doubt they are real, but they are quite a generalization. And well, I haven't searched online but can you point me to a similar product i.e. futon/mat for $3000 on any website? I'm curious about it.
As per the gimmick.... well, mattresses have been called mattresses for a long time and have been thicker than 5" for a very long time. And so have been futons. I am afraid I can't really buy your the marketing gimmick argument.
It seems to me that a 5" mattress with superior technology could easily replace a 10" mattress of traditional manufacture. It wouldn't be the first time, either - who would have thought 10 years ago that the running shoe market would successfully be inundated with a bunch of "barefoot shoes?"
However, it might NOT be so easy to convince consumers that a 5" and 10" mattress are comparable, because for decades, that industry has been slapping layer upon layer of foam and pillow tops onto its mattresses to make the mattress LOOK good and justify increasingly higher margins.
I just ordered a mattress from Tuft & Needle because I want to give it a try myself. But I suspect that, if T&N want to be successful, they'll need to find analogies like the running shoe version (which is, admittedly flawed in that barefoot trainers aren't much cheaper than standard shoes) to explain how they can produce a 5" mattress that is as comfortable as a traditionally sized one.
Nevertheless kudos to these guys for building something high quality with low overhead!
The website is really beautiful. Well done. It almost makes you feel I have to buy this!!! I think that's the key point.
Because apart from that... well... there's a rule in business that is you get what you pay for. Even if mattress retailers are making a fortune on margins, well you guys also have margins too. And a retail price of $299..to..$499-king tells me that your mattresses are very low end.
So the website is beautiful but very misleading. Like the infographic about the cost of making a mattress. It probably should title it "Here is how a cheap mattress is marked up". Because there is mattresses and mattresses. Tons of variations, fabrics and qualities. And well.. you're not even selling mattresses or at least we don't call that a mattress here ( Spain ) but a mat instead. It is just too thin. Less than half the thickness of a regular mattress. Then of course, the fact that is made of foam only makes it worse as with that thickness it will unavoidable deform with usage. Who tells otherwise is lying or just very new to the business plainly because all foam mattresses deform to some degree.
Then there is the foam density, that I can't see anywhere in the specs. And as you can guess when you import materials the bigger the density the more expensive the foam sheets are. But hey, people today demand cheap prices. But anyways, mattresses these days tend to have lesser foam densities as people want cheaper prices. But of course that comes with the cost of deformability and that's why mattresses these days don't last that much as they used to in the past.
One thing that tells how good your marketing efforts are is that the mattress is foldable. Someone not used to mattress would think: AWESOME. Some used would think, oh no another crappy sofa-bed mat. I'd never recommend anyone to buy a foldable bed unless for an apartment with very low space and of course... for a sofa-bed!
So my summary would be: really well done making attractive a low-end product. The marketing is excellent and you definitely found a market out there. The website is beautiful but well.... you sell what you sell, tons of half-truths on it.