Key European mattress makers
As the boom in mattress start-ups continues apace, some of the best traditional mattress brands are also thriving and proving more than resilient to the challenge. Hereare three we’d recommend.

01
Schramm
Germany
Winnweiler-based Schramm can trace its roots back to 1923, when Karl Schramm established the company from a small workshop. Today its premium mattresses are revered around the world. Looking closely at the brand’s Divina model, it’s easy to see why: it’s made using silk, wool (from free-range sheep), natural latex, cotton and heat-tempered nine-coil springs, which are individually sewn by hand into cotton pockets. It’s a perfect example of science and craft coming together.
schrammwerkstaetten.de

02
Coco-mat
Greece
Coco-mat was founded back in 1989 and has become one of the world’s best-recognised mattress brands, with shops in 16 countries. Much of the company’s success, however, is down to its behind-the- scenes work supplying mattresses to hundreds of hotels around the world, both independents and chains. All the mattresses are made in Coco-mat’s privately owned factory in Xanthi, northern Greece.
coco-mat.com

03
Vispring
UK
Vispring has been making beds since the turn of the 20th century. The brand’s high-end mattresses are hand-assembled using all- natural components, including vicuña, cashmere, raw silk and horsehair; its vanadium steel coils come in 58 different types. In 2015 the company reported comfy sales of more than £40m (€43m).
vispring.com

Tuft & Needle, Casper and their ilk also insist that they, unlike their old-school competitors, can adapt their product quickly to respond to any consumer feedback. Tuft & Needle’s Marino, for example, talks about a “solid feedback loop”, which allows them to respond to their customers. Casper, meanwhile, has made about 20 to 25 “micro innovations” to its mattress since the 2014 launch. The business model is certainly convincing investors: Casper has been valued at more than $500m (€464m).

However, the “old-versus-new” narrative these companies trumpet can be overstated. For all their talk of “next-generation” memory foams, none of these new companies invented the foam mattress (Tempur-Pedic, an early adopter, launchd one in the 1970s) or even the bed-in-a-box model (there’s a company of the same name that has been around for more than a decade).

At the same time, there are question marks surrounding the actual products these start-ups are peddling. Many of the foams used in the industry are oil-based, making their environmental credentials less than five-star. Critics also claim that foam mattresses “sleep hot”: foams are often used as insulators and these companies generally cover their mattresses in a sheet made of synthetic material, most commonly a kind of polyester, which is not the most breathable fabric. Meanwhile, others complain of the smell that can fill your home after the mattress has been released from its plastic wrapping. In reality, these companies’ biggest innovations have been in rethinking the way mattresses are retailed and in perfecting (and investing heavily in) their branding and marketing strategies. Hence the ads on New York’s subway and London’s Underground.

This is where Drift, its co-founders Adam Black and Matthew Hardcastle and that factory in Leeds come back in. The incipient transformation of the mattress market that started in the US has now flopped down in the UK, which has seen a similar influx of bed-in-a-box mattress start-ups. They have names such as Eve, Simba and Leesa; and don’t look now but Casper has launched here too. But as the mattress-industry veteran Black puts it, “They are tech companies; they’re not mattress companies.”

The central claim of the duo behind Drift is that their company combines the same innovation in the retail model employed by their competitors with genuine innovation on the product side. “Matthew and I were only ever going to enter this market if we knew we had a differentiated product,” says Black. “I could take you today to three manufacturers in Britain making ‘foam sandwiches’ and we could set up one of those companies before the end of the day.”

Whereas the vast majority of their competitors wrap their mattresses in polyester, a Drift mattress has a natural viscose cover that ensures breathability. And while the majority of other brands simply glue layers of foam together, a king-size Drift mattress (costing €810, putting it roughly in the same price category as its competitors) has more than 4,000 microsprings and a dense layer of wool (“nature’s great heat regulator,” as Black puts it) and cotton packed on top of its base comfort layer of foam. The springs are a particular plus in the UK as the market for sprung mattresses is considerably bigger here than that for foam mattresses. For Drift, therefore, half the battle is already won.

Black and Hardcastle are confident they have a product that can more than simply compete with some of the big hitters of this now-saturated sector. Luckily for them, wider societal shifts will continue to keep demand springy. “There is no danger of this becoming a smaller market,” says Black. “People are thinking about sleep more and more: quality of sleep is tied to performance at work and there are studies that show how children’s obesity is connected to sleep.” Hardcastle adds, “Some people are even considering revisiting the importance of the nap.”

It does all make you wonder, though: are we perhaps in danger of giving the whole thing a bit too much thought? “Philosopher John Locke was of the opinion that it mattered nothing at all as to what we slept on,” says Virginia Tech’s sleep historian A Roger Ekirch. “He said you could sleep on a wooden palette, once you got used to it, just as well as on a very thick mattress.” The people from the mattress start-up scene would surely disagree.