Getting Played We decided to get a new bed. Oh, there were reasons. Our $67 million dollar Stearns & Foster mattress drove me crazy with its lumpiness. We also were in the very unusual NYC situation where we moved into an apartment that had a bigger bedroom and figured that we could get a bigger bed. Crazy.
Disrupt! When we bought our previous mattress, we did it in a store as was the style. It was an idiotic experience with hidden fees and pressure to buy various warranties and all that. I had read about the Caspers and Leesas of the world who were doing direct to customer sales. Their reviews were good and I wanted to try out their whole 'disruptive' sales model.
Foamy The mattresses that these direct-to-consumer shops are selling are combination memory foam + foam foam mattresses. So, no springs. They can then squash them up real good and ship them to you in a friggin box. Which is insane.
Research I began the research. In hindsight, I think I could have just drawn a name from a hat and had better odds as it was such a mentally annoying process to review each and compare.
Casper was my first choice. Everyone seems to like them. We even went to their little showroom and laid on a bed. But, then I noticed more and more reviews of Casper versus Leesa where the author mentions that they kept the Leesa for themselves. Were these just paid Leesa reviewers? Were they real? ConsumerReports liked the Casper over the Leesa. But one from BrooklynBedding they liked even more. My issue with the BrooklynBedding one that CR liked was that it was only available at Wal-Mart (??!) and I was not doing that. BrooklynBedding also seemed to sell mattresses under the DreamFoam name, but only on Amazon. Oh, stop confusing me.
The BB folks even had videos of their factories at work (located in Arizona) and people stated that it was confirmed that all the foams they used were american (chinese-made foams are apparently the worst and will give you radioactive cooties).
Casper also has their factories in the USA and uses similar foam, but the fact that CR seemed to like the BrooklynBedding mattress a tad bit more, I took the chance and ordered the "#BestMattressEver" bed. What is to lose with a long (120 days?) trial period?
Big Box! Yes. Our mattress came in a big box. Yes. It was moderately fun to take it out and watch it expand like some sort of crazy... expanding.. thing.
We ordered the standard "#BestMattressEver" model from BrooklynBedding. Got some nice cotton percale sheets from LL Bean that are crisp and cool and some new blankets and pillows (actually, the pillows we got are the best - from BedBathBeyond - and I'll have to "blog" about those).
Comfy I was thinking how much I liked my bed at home the other night while sleeping in a WESTIN Heavenly Bed. The BB mattress is pretty comfortable. No weird soreness anywhere - even after the first night. It's soft. And firm. Like me.
We aren't using a box frame for this first time which seems rebellious and punk rock. The mattress just sits on the metal slats on our new Room & Board bedframe (which I also recommend). The big difference is how low the bed is now. This is just something unique to us, but we went from a very tall bed frame + boxspring + very tall mattress to a relatively low bed.
Yay or Nay? Yay. I like our Brooklyn Bedding bed. That said, this was a very frustrating online shopping experience as you can imagine. But, these things are relatively cheap (the King was $900? Or something like that) and they have a crazy long and no-questions-asked return policy.
