johmas

If you’d email me (jt@tn), I’d love to send you our newest iteration. We’ve progressively improved customer sat since founding so I wonder if this was potentially a defect. There were a few seasons where our manufacturing struggled with capacity and quality suffered for a while. I’m hoping that’s what happened here. Pls email me, would love to try one more time if you are open to it.

JT

Back in 2013 I posted a Show HN (was changed to Tell HN) for our one year old mattress startup Tuft & Needle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6900625

The post resulted in a Fortune article (https://fortune.com/2014/01/22/meet-the-warby-parker-of-matt...) which helped to catalyze hockey stick growth and triggered a wave of vc money into the industry, we turned the interest down. The vc money resulted in new competitors for us (Casper/Purple/+200 others as barriers fell). This collectively caused massive change.

We grew to 250mm arr before we merged with serta simmons in 2018.. to disrupt within their brand portfolio. We’ve been working on their brands to mimic our model.

Our growth was 100% bootstrapped with no more than $6k. My co-founder and I seriously attribute our show HN as one of the reasons we were able to build our company the way we did and for spurring interest in our competitors to enter the market. The competition also accelerated our growth without the need of funding, their VC money fueled advertising raising awareness.

Anyways, one data point for you. Super grateful for this community.

JT from Tuft & Needle here. I met with Andrea and the team last year. They are solid. The big difference with this tech is that it can actually impact the way you sleep as opposed to just reporting data points.

When you sleep badly you usually know it in the morning. A wristband telling me isn’t that useful. A tool that actually helps you fall asleep and stay asleep provides significantly more value.

We added a btc option at Tuft & Needle last November and up until about Feb was about 5% of our sales. btc purchases have been steadily dropping and are now around .01%

That's a fantastic idea. I like the transparency around each stage and what's happening.

We make mattresses. Every member on our team sleeps on them each night. It's absolutely critical for us to have this first hand experience, especially as our team becomes larger with varying body types and personal preferences.

We iterate on our own internal feedback in addition to our customer's.

That's a good question. We don't exactly view it as an ethical issue. Anyone on the team can opt-in to whatever percentage of their compensation they'd like to be paid in bitcoin. Currently no one is taking 100%.

We do educate how the currency functions and the risks there may be.

We began accepting bitcoin last month and aren't converting all of our bitcoin to dollars. We have several employees who accept their pay in bitcoin.

Taking things a bit further, we are optimistic about bitcoin as a payment form with our suppliers as the volatility stabilises. As an example, one of our suppliers is Belgium based and we'd be able to save on the currency exchange with those payments. We've discussed it and they didn't turn their nose up to the idea.

Kindmatt, thanks for the reply. There are many points here and I'll do my best to address your concerns below.

Your pricing is completely off. You can buy organic cotton fabric for as low as $6 that is 100% organic cotton certified by GOTS and you buy can knit fabrics for $12.

I wouldn't disagree with you about being able to get it for $6 or even for nearly free when a fabric supplier has material they are getting rid of. There are varying attributes that makeup a cost other than just raw material. The numbers I was using was based on averages found in research we collected from suppliers' prices within the USA.

Tuft and Needle buys from a manufacturer and resells it just like Sit 'n Sleep, Mattress Firm, Sleepy's, etc.

We are the manufacturer of the mattress, so the comparison to other resellers is quite misleading. With that being said, we certainly have partnered with 3rd party suppliers for the individual ingredients. As an example, we don't have our own foam pouring machines or fabric knitting machines yet.

Why do you say “about 2 pounds” as the density? This sounds like cop out. You are probably using 1.8 and some 2 pound. Be open and honest so people can make an educated buying decision.

I'm being honest with you when stating our foam is "about 2lbs." The reason I say "about" is because foam in general has a slight variance, it's never exact. It's not abnormal for foam to be .1% more or less dense but, on average, ours is 2lbs. We don't hide that fact from competitors. For skeptics we encourage them to purchase and test the foam with lab equipment.

You don't agree that those are good comps. How about these? A queen Ikea is $329 for 2.2 pound foam and a ½” thicker. (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00139813/) Where Tuft and Needle is $399 for a supposedly 2 pound foam. Surprisingly, most IKEA mattresses are made in the US so don’t give the made in China routine on this.

That is definitely a better comparison. Our intention is not to undercut Ikea prices and even if we tried it probably would not be possible for a while. They are a mega billion dollar company and can leverage their economy of scale. We respect them for their pricing and what we offer our customers is a different experience than simply price alone.

Serta at Sleepy's is $299.99. Even if they were using a lower density, how could they be marking this 1,000% as Tuft and Needle states. Sealy has one that is 5 ¾” thick for $299.99 at Sleepy’s

The markup certainly depends on which product you're talking about and which retailer is selling it. If that specific Serta mattress is actually priced in a more fair manner, that would be great. There are also other smaller companies taking a similar approach as we are, which we are really excited to see. Mattress Underground has done a pretty good job of discussing companies like this.

Why is Tuft and Needle $100 more than the name brands which are made in the USA, too? Don’t give me the density because like Sealy and Serta, Tuft and Needle won’t disclose density. For sake of argument, let’s say Sealy uses a 1.2 pound and Tuft and Needle uses 2 pound foam. There is 200 board feet in a queen mattress and the cost per board foot between 1.2 and 2 pound is 25 cents. The added cost would be $50 in raw material.

We do disclose our density but will not disclose the other specs you're wanting because those are our secret sauce. You're giving some examples of foam board foot costs but to be fair, not all foam is priced on its density. A 1.2 pound foam, as you say, may cost 25 cents but if you pour with a different ILD, compression modulas, different chemical makeup, dye, or other attributes of many, it will certainly affect the cost. It isn't black and white. This is why you find quite a few foam companies inventing new mixtures and formulas and charging different amounts for the same density. Our foam makeup is unique.

This is untrue; “Tuft & Needle was founded to offer boutique-quality beds at a fraction of the cost. You shouldn't have to overpay for a good night's sleep.” Tuft and Needle is nowhere close to a boutique bed.

Boutique is certainly a subjective term. For some clarity as to why we use that word, we're a small team and we're offering something, that we believe, is specialised.

Finally, prove to me that mattress stores markup the mattresses 500%. If you look at Mattress Firm's 10K Report, you will see that there GM is nowhere near that. In 2012, they had sales of $1,007,337,000 with a COGS of 614,572,000. That is a 64% markup. No, sales and marketing are not included in this. They spent 245,555,000 on sales and marketing. Tuft and Needle needs to get the facts straight.

The 500% statement I made above was based on the product you linked. I explained how I arrived at that number above. But as far as Mattress Firm, we never singled that company out or have ever looked into them. I don't know what their markup is but it's certainly an interesting question.

I see you just made a fresh HN account and are not exposing your identity in the profile. If you'd like to have a deeper conversation it'd be great to jump on a call or meet face to face if you'd like. I'd even be willing to show you around our facility if you're in the area.

Hi Kindmatt,

You're comparing us to a mass produced cotton futon which has a radically different cost structure to manufacture than a foam mattress. In fact, the actual cost to manufacture that linked product, based on pricing we have for those, is around $30 to $55 for a queen. That would put that product somewhere around 500% markup at the retail price. There is also a big difference in the quality of material, as an example, if you cut open that futon--they remove the zippers--you'll see it's filled with scraps of fabric instead of new cotton batting. They do that to cut product costs further to keep the margins high. Those are being produced by Wolf Corp in Indiana who is a Serta partner. Just the quilted cover for our twin size costs more than that to produce.

Organic cotton costs roughly double. So if you buy knitted fabric at $6 a yard, organic fabric will cost around $10-12 if it's a more than 50% of the composition. So the pricing difference is drastically more than you mentioned. You typically use 4-5 yards to make a mattress cover so you're talking $25 increasing to $50 just for the cover fabric. For a futon like you linked, they're using a low oz woven twill that costs less than $2 a yard typically totalling about $8 for the cover.

The poly foam we designed currently has a density of about 2 lbs. Which is on the high end for foam quality. You can learn a lot more about densities on the Mattress Underground. I'm not willing to disclose ILD, compression modulus or formula recipes because those are currently trade secrets and we honestly don't see a good reason to disclose them at this time. Not to mention that the only people we've found that are interested in those details are competitors.

You are more than free to contact us and ask us questions. This thread is starting to get old so you might get a faster response if you email me direct jt at tuftandneedle.

The infographic is based on actual numbers we have of leading mattress company's products so there is nothing false about those numbers.

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.

USA for all the materials and we assemble them ourselves here too.

I'm glad it's been working out well for you.

Regarding JIT, I can see large corps trying to migrate to a process like that but for us it was the only option that was economically feasible, to be honest. We are very limited in space to even operate day to day. This may not have been the case if we were making something that was small but these beds take up quite a lot of space.

Thank you for the feedback.

That's really great feedback. Thank you.

We don't offer shipping to Alaska but we can make it happen for you if you'd like. Send me an email jt at tuftandneedle

Net Promoter Score is how we measure Customer Satisfaction. Amazon is good but not as much breadth as we'd like from our customer base.

To be fair, Amazon sends review request emails to every one of our customers who buy through that channel. These people don't get a test drive of our mattress before they get it so I'd expect we are a little more exposed than a car you wouldn't rate unless you test drove it and purchased it because you liked it.

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?

We're bootstrapped and haven't taken any funding.

Thank you for the kind words. I'll share them with the team.

I assure you we make them to order and that bed was crafted just for you.

To give some more transparency, we do not have enough warehouse space to store product longer than a week anyway. The only thing i can think of is that we had pre-printed law labels and used those on your bed. If you email me your order number I'll personally check this for you and tell you the exact date and time when each component was made. We are a "Just in Time" factory and need to operate lean.

Once an order comes in we begin making the cover about 2-3 business days later (the first stitch) and the day we ship is the same day we put the cover on the core and package it up. If we put the cover on earlier, there is a chance it may get dirty or might be touched by someone without gloves.

I'm also willing to show you some photographs of the room where we operate and store the cores so you can see how small it is. Please let me know if you'd like to see that at jt at tuftandneedle

Thank you for the feedback.

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.

It's very porous. If you took a piece of latex foam and blew air into it, you can feel the air come out of the other side.

We make them and fulfill them and we source our supplies such as fabrics and foams from other factories in the US.

Primarily because we do the fulfillment ourselves and because we don't want Amazon to take the customer service away from us.

When you're shopping for a foam mattress, be sure you are getting something that has a higher density foam. I'd recommend something above 1.8 lbs. When looking for memory foam you'll want something even more dense like 4+ lbs.

For body impression, unfortunately most mattresses will do this over time. This is even more prevalent with natural options such as cotton or wool. You may want to consider replacing your mattress more frequently and using a mattress protector that will keep body moisture (sweat, etc) from being absorbed into the core.

We do not have TDCPP in our foams. We'd never put something like that in there not to mention there was a new law passed outlawing the use of FR chemicals inside of foam.

We met the FR requirements of California, the strictest, by using a rayon/poly/sand blended material that we quilt into our covers.

CertiPUR essentially tests the off gassing to a their strict standards. The reason we went with a 3rd party for tests is because the FTC hasn't established offgassing standards yet. So to hold ourselves accountable and to give a point of reference to our customers, we had CertiPUR test in their labs.

If you have any other questions feel free to email me. jt at tuftandneedle

We aren't big fans of Flame Retardants. There is a big political ordeal around the need of them. As an example, FR material delays ignition by only a few seconds but produces quite a lot more smoke which is the primary killer in a fire. We should probably do a blog post about it.

As you may know, FR is a requirement and mattresses have to be thoroughly tested in a lab. We use a rayon/poly/sand blend that is inherently fire retardant. We chose that material because it is chemical free.

We currently are #1 in Top Rated in our category of Mattresses & Box Springs which is the category that encompasses all of those products.

We aren't ranked as the #1 Best seller which we don't mean to cause any confusion with. Those are typically Prime only products and those are ranked by sales volume.

There may also be a difference in ranking if you're in a region that we don't ship to such as outside of the USA. I'm not sure how Amazon differs rankings by country.

Here is a direct link to our specifications: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/bed/specs

We sourced all of our own materials from the outside fabric to our foam mixtures. We've also iterated on the design roughly 130 times since we first launched it. We try to keep a tight feedback loop on its design.

As an example, when we changed from a cotton bed to a foam bed we built our first prototype by sourcing a ton of different foams from different foam pourers and putting them all in a single room. We locked ourselves in there for a few days layering all kinds of densities and compositions until we found a feel we thought was really great.

We have done similar things with the fabric, stitching, and our policies.

We have a manufacturing license and hope to vertically integrate more of our supply production as we grow.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

We don't ship overseas yet. We have to do some more growing first but it's something we'd like to provide.

The primary issue we see with expanding is that we want to provide excellent service and if we were to just ship it and have no presence there then we may not be able to execute on that.

We may need to actually have a presence in the country to follow through on the experience we're building in the USA.

We'll check on that. Thank you for pointing it out.

Regarding Ikea, we're not really able to compete with them on pricing as a startup and I'm not really sure that'd be a wise move for us once we could. We really just want to focus on fair pricing and a well designed quality product.

That's one of the reasons that we're not fans of memory foam. We use a foam that is breathable and that you don't sink into. Ours has a little more bounce.