WHY ARE MATTRESSES SO EXPENSIVE?
Mattress Facts
We spend about a third of our lives sleeping. And while investing in our sleeping arrangement to maximize its quality makes sense, you don’t want to end up spending another third of your life paying for it.
In fact, as you read through mattress reviews, you might even ask yourself: why are mattresses so expensive in the first place?
The answer to this question has a couple of layers to it. There are some features common to all mattresses that drive up their prices.
Our Latest Reviews
Discover Better Sleep
Design – Everything from the shape of the mattress through the materials used to build it needs to be carefully considered.
Construction – Assembly must be able to use human-controlled machines to consistently deliver safe mattresses that last over time.
Testing – Quality control must be utilized to make sure that every mattress sent to consumers has met the highest of standards.
Transportation – Even if they are made to be light, the large dimensions that mattresses bear can make them challenging to transport.
In addition to those factors, the very features that may make a mattress work better for you might drive the price up since each one requires design, special construction, and rigorous quality control. It might help to think about the different types of mattresses available beyond the classic spring mattress since this will help you see where innovation lies:
Memory foam mattress
At their core, memory foam mattresses leverage—you guessed it—memory foam to provide comfort to sleepers. This foam is widely touted to distribute weight evenly and last over time. There are lots of variations on memory foam geared towards different types of sleepers (back, side, etc.) as well as to help control temperature regulation.
Latex mattress
Smart bed
The price of a smart bed can easily become steep based on how many sensors it has built in to assess how well you’re sleeping and make adjustments accordingly.
Adjustable Air Beds
Most adjustable air beds allow individuals to use technology to adjust the firmness of their side of the bed. Air beds are often sold with their own base, which may or may not be adjustable. The adjustable base allows you to raise or lower the head and foot of the bed. The Sleep Number brand of beds is an example of an adjustable air bed.
Hybrid Mattresses
The hybrid mattress has emerged as somewhat of a mattress hero by blending the best of several different mattress types together to create the ultimate supportive, breathable experience.
Purple is one of the leading hybrid mattress brands, having innovated the industry with its unique design and construction. Their founders’ background is actually in aerospace engineering, which is already known to be on the cutting edge of material design and new product development since astronauts’ have to have their daily needs met under unique circumstances.
In fact, Purple’s founders created a new Hyper-Elastic Polymer that was used in all sorts of hospital applications, due to its ability to redistribute pressure; this is critical for an effective mattress, which has to redistribute the weight of the sleeper so that they can wake up without the pains of having hard pressure focused on particular parts of their body. After a few years of testing and further innovation, these two founders pinpointed ways to produce mattresses with their new material in a far more cost-effective manner than their competitors, so that they could roll out these mattresses at a fraction of the cost.
Mattresses remain costly. The best way to evaluate this purchase is in terms of the long-term cost-benefit. If you shell out a bit more money now, but you find yourself consistently sleeping well and getting more out of your days, was the purchase worth it? The answer is likely yes.
When evaluating your mattress investment, look for brands that offer a free night trial, first-rate warranties, free or white glove shipping and/or delivery. The Purple mattress brand is a great example of this. They offer a 100-night free trial so that you can make sure that the bed you purchased does indeed work for you. Purple also offers several different financing options to help make the purchase easier; because of the costs of production, they might not be able to drive the price down further, but they can help make it more affordable for you.
Sources:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need
https://purple.com/
