The Healthy Foundations Blog

This is another tough question to answer because comfort is such an individual thing, but I will do my best.

Bottom line, our 10" Memory Foam Mattress has been the best received memory foam mattress we've ever carried (and we've previously carried the Tempur-Pedic TM mattress and the Isotonic TM mattress). By best received I mean our 10" Memory Foam Mattress has the lowest return rate of any mattress we've ever sold. Along with the low return rate, we've also received some really nice customer testimonials - you can find many of these on our Mattress page and more mattress reviews scattered through our Shopping.com reviews. The proof is really in the pudding, and both based on our return rate and our customers testimonials the 10" Memory Foam Mattress is the most comfortable mattress we've carried.

My one caution would be that our 10" Memory Foam Mattress is a firm mattress. Some people, I think, have a misconception that a memory foam mattress is soft due to the top memory foam layer (which is soft and yielding). But this soft memory foam layer is on top of 7" of firm, base foam. So while our memory foam mattress does have the soft upper memory foam layer that gives the bed a conforming feel and reduces pressure points, the firm base foam gives our mattress an overall firm feel.

Tempur-Pedic ® is a registered trademark of Dan-Foam A/S Corporation. We don't sell the Tempur-Pedic ® brand, and we are in no way affiliated with Tempur-Pedic ®. The information on this site with regard to Tempur-Pedic ® foam is for comparison purposes to our product line only.

Posted by David Rosenberg at 09:15 AM | Permalink

A question we often get is:

How does your mattress compare to the Tempur-Pedic TM mattress?

Answer:

While both our 10" Memory Foam Mattress and the Tempur-Pedic TM mattresses are made of memory foam layered on top of base foams, they really have very different feels. This is due to the differences in the foams used in the beds.

Our 10" Memory Foam Mattress uses a denser base foam, and I think that this adds a bit more support and has a bouncier feel than the Tempur-Pedic TM base foam. And the memory foams used in our 10" Memory Foam Mattress is a softer, less dense memory foam than the Tempur TM used in the Tempur-Pedic TM. We've found that this less dense memory foam has some advantages over the denser Tempur TM foam. One big advantage is that it is easier for people to move around on (the Tempur TM foam can be very firm and stiff feeling at room temperature, and as we talked about in an earlier post it can create kind of a cocoon around you that can make it difficult to turn over, etc).

But getting away from the technical aspects of the differences in the foams used on our 10" Memory Foam Mattress and Tempur-Pedic's TM, the bottom line issue is how they compare in terms of comfort. And the least biased way I know of comparing comfort is simple - the return rate under our respective money back trials.

To get a feel for the Tempur-Pedic TM return rate, I talked with a former Tempur-Pedic TM retailer (he had been one of the top 35 dealers in the country in from 2004 - 2006). He estimated his return rate on the Tempur-Pedic TM mattresses to be between 10 - 11%. How does this compare to ours? Our most recent calculation of our return rate on the 10" Memory Foam Mattress was 7%. That isn't to say our mattress is per se more comfortable, but the low return rate does show that it can hold its own with the Tempur-Pedic TM on comfort.

An associated question we get is which Tempur-Pedic TM model does our 10" Memory Foam Mattress best compare?

This is a tough one, since all these mattresses use such different foams and so have different feels. But if I had to compare, I would say that our 10" Memory Foam Mattress (which is a firm mattress ) has an overall feel that is somewhere between the ClassicBed by Tempur-Pedic TM (which I used to sell way back when, and was so firm we had almost 13% returns), and the DeluxeBed by Tempur-Pedic TM (which may have a bit softer feel than our mattress).

Tempur-Pedic ® is a registered trademark of Dan-Foam A/S Corporation. We don't sell the Tempur-Pedic ® brand, and we are in no way affiliated with Tempur-Pedic ®. The information on this site with regard to Tempur-Pedic ® foam is for comparison purposes to our product line only.

Posted by David Rosenberg at 08:30 AM | Permalink

Our question for today is:

Will a lower density foam or higher density foam be hotter to sleep on?

Answer:

Boy, that is a tough question. I can't say I have a definitive answer for you. We've tested a lot of memory foams, and talked with many manufacturers about this issue, but I've never heard that density is the issue here. Instead, I think that it is more dependant on the particular characteristics of that memory foam.

What do I mean by this? There are a lot of factors that go into making a memory foam besides the density. There is the particular chemical formulation of the foam, whether any fillers are used (we don't carry foam that uses fillers, since they are just a way to boost density artificially, but we hear that many memory foams do use fillers like sand, etc to increase density - and these may affect how hot the foam sleeps), and the actual production method for making the foam.

All these may affect whether the foam sleeps hot. And while some of these factors may affect density, I've never heard or experienced any sort of hard and fast rule that the density of a memory foam in itself will have some affect on how hot the memory foam sleeps.

In our experience, we've carried memory foams with densities from 3.2 lb to over 5 lb. And we haven't seen that the density really predicted whether the foam would sleep hot. We really never have any heat complaints on either our 10" memory foam mattress (which uses 3.2 and 3.4 lb density memory foam) or our memory foam mattress topper pads (which use 4 lb density memory foam). In fact, the only time we've really run into heat problems was when we used to carry the "leading brand" memory foam mattress. And this really wasn't a true heat issue - for the most part, it was not due to the memory foam but instead due to the cover they used (which had a plastic sort of membrane to keep your body's moisture out of the mattress). When we had people remove the cover and just sleep on the "leading brand" foam mattress, almost always they no longer felt uncomfortably warm on the mattress.

Posted by David Rosenberg at 12:06 PM | Permalink

We are starting a new series of posts answering some of the questions we've been getting that people are having a hard time finding answers to.

Today's question is:

How easy is it [a memory foam mattress] to move around during the night...or for other activities?

Answer:

It really depends on the type of memory foam used in making the mattress. We had this issue come up fairly often when we sold the "leading brand" of memory foam many years ago. This was because their memory foam is dense and firm at room temperature - and softens a great deal when in contact with your body (your body temperature softens the foam). So where you sleep is soft, but the foam over the rest of the bed stays firm. For some people, they felt it was difficult to roll over or move on the mattress because they would be kind of cocooned in the soft foam.

But other memory foams aren't so temperature sensitive and don't cause this problem. For example, the foam we use in our 10" Memory Foam Mattress is softer at room temperature, and while it softens up a bit more with your body's temp. it doesn't create this sort of cocooning problem. We really never get this complaint from our customers - we just don't hear that it is difficult to move around on or that people have problems turning over at night.

How can you know if a particular memory foam mattress have this problem? It is really hard to judge from just laying down in a showroom, since with the lights and such in a showroom the temperature can be much warmer than a standard bedroom - and so the foam may feel much softer than it may when you get it home (this is a common complaint of people who try the "leading memory foam mattress" out in a store). I guess the best way to get a gauge on this is to ask the retailer how often they hear this kind of complaint from their customers - and how many returns they get due to this. You'll have to judge for yourself if they are giving you the real story or just a story. This is another reason why it is important to have a money back guarantee on your mattress purchase. There is just more incentive for the retailer to tell you the straight story if they are offering you a money back guarantee like we do (we offer a 1 year money back on our memory foam mattress). Since the customer can easily return the mattress, there is little reason for a retailer to mislead any customer - doing so, in fact, would just end up costing him money since you can't resell a returned mattress.

As for other activities, I'm guessing you mean "intimate" activities. And while I don't think I want to go into too much detail here, we do get this question a fair amount - and so here's my best shot at answering it. Memory foam mattresses don't have springs, so they aren't really "bouncy" like a standard bed. And the memory foam itself absorbs energy, so this decreases the "bounce" as well. I can't say if any particular person will like or dislike this decrease in "bounce", but it is a different feeling. Again, something you can't judge in a store (at least without risking getting arrested), so if you need to check this out make sure you go with someone like us that offers the money back guarantee.

Posted by David Rosenberg at 11:44 AM | Permalink