Disruptive Mattress Innovation (Rob)

After combining our households, we sold Becky’s twin bed and slept on my full-sized bed. But a full-sized mattress can feel a bit crowded for two people, especially when those two people are not accustomed to sharing their sleeping space. So we decided after a few months that it was finally time for a king-sized bed.

This meant purchasing a bed frame, which I pretty much left up to Becky. She found one on IKEA that she liked. IKEA called it the 'FJELL'. But it was more like ‘FHELL’ putting the thing together. I am in awe of how IKEA can cram a whole bed frame into several flat boxes filled with strange little pieces and produce instructions for assembly with diagrams that transcend verbal language and look like cave drawings. After a few weeks of partially assembled furniture scattered around the bedroom (Figure 1A), we mustered up the motivation to complete the project, and it did look nice when it was all intact (Figure 1B). Our marriage also was intact, which is truly a blessing considering the reputation that IKEA has for affecting relationships (assembling IKEA furniture has actually been used in exercises for couples therapy).


Figure 1. A) The IKEA bed frame in its initial high entropy state. B) The assembled IKEA bed frame in its final equilibrated state.

Meanwhile, we also had to shop for a mattress, which is about as fun as shopping for a used car. Here in the Phoenix valley, there is no shortage of mattress retailers and they all want to make a deal with you on various brands of mattresses that all begin with the letter ‘S’. On top of that, there is the Goldilocks problem of finding one that is not too soft or too firm for one of us or both of us. 

Discouraged by cruel reality, I procrastinated this part of the process. Until one day, I was driving home, and I saw a billboard (Figure 2). It was for a mattress company that said they were different. I looked them up when I got home. I was intrigued. It was called 'Tuft and Needle' and as it turned out, they were a local company that mostly did online sales. But since they were local, they did have a showroom we could visit. So we went to check it out.

Figure 2. A billboard asserting the economic virtues of a disruptive innovator in the mattress industry.

They were in an old nondescript brick building in downtown Phoenix that you have to climb some rickety stairs to enter. When we opened the door, I sort of expected to see a factory with a bunch of machines making mattresses or something. Instead, we were greeted by a friendly young hipster-like dude behind a desk on a Mac in a big open room full of about 20 other young people at desks, also with their Macs. We were offered a bottle of water and soon an employee chaperoned us to a little room, and invited us to test the mattress. No sales pitch was given, no sense of urgency was implied. When we left, they said if we would like to purchase a mattress, we could do so online and have it delivered at no charge with a 100-day no questions return policy. And so we did, no returning needed.

This is what I imagine buying a Tesla is like. Nice to see the disruptive innovation that Clayton Christiansen talks about going on in the mattress world.