PU foam makers adapt to a booming 'bed-in-a-box' market

The mattress market has undergone a seismic shift in the past few years. Main Street shops and shopping centers are still full of department stores and specialist bedding shops where consumers can go and try out mattresses.

But pressure is growing on this traditonal distribution model.

The growing trend for bed-in-a-box products is disrupting the market significantly. Sold online and delivered compressed and ready to burst out of their vacuum packaging once they reach their new home, bed-in-a-box mattresses are taking an increasingly substantial slice of the market.

The U.S. is leading the change. Phoenix-based Tuft & Needle launched its first product in 2012, and a year later New York's Casper made its debut. Multiple others rushed in behind them.

"Casper hit the market at the right time, with the right business model and the right marketing," said Brent Limer, vice president of U.S. sales at Latexco LLC. "The marketing spend has got so high, we are now seeing a consolidation of players who tried but are getting out because they can't keep up."

Points of differentiation are important for success.

"Purple [Purple Innovation LLC of Alpine, Utah] with its quirky marketing, has come in and been able to make a splash because its product is different, with its own polymer in the top layer to differentiate it," Limer said. "If you are going to make a Casper or Tuft & Needle knock-off you will never be able to compete on marketing. If you have something different, you can compete."

Purple said it saw 271 percent sales growth in 2017.

Another competitor, Helix Sleep of New York, is finding success by offering a customized mattress, Limer said. The company has customers answer a series of questions on its website, then an algorithim prompts the buyer toward one of its models.

Eve is one of the big players in the United Kingdom market.

"We don't think so much about the bed-in-a-box concept, we just design a good mattress. We can optimize the logistics and costs, ship it free and make it quicker and easier. That is the route we'd like to take," said Felix Lobkowicz, Eve's chief operating officer. "But if it becomes too expensive to ship [using our normal channels] we would have to ship in a different way."

Lobkowicz added that the dissatisfaction mattress buyers felt when choosing a new mattress traditionally opened the door to bed-in-a-box firms.

"This made it possible for younger companies with strong marketing propositions [based] around simple choices, one-product price transparency, and optimized service experience to enter the market. Foam had a more modern connotation than springs, and the market was ready to be disrupted," he said.

Purple launched its mattresses in the U.S. in January 2016, following a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

"So many groups jumped into the space, I think there could be some kind of race to the bottom in terms of pricing when there isn't much differentiation," said Russ Whatcott, Purple's director of innovation.

"Anybody who's got some differentiation and a better system is going to have a better chance of making it through, but where there's very little differentiation, the market is too crowded to continue this way for very long. And our marketing team had done a great job of grabbing attention," he said.

Purple's point of difference is its hyper-elastic polymer top layer, combined with high-density polyurethane foam.

"In February we launched a mattress that also contains a spring unit, as well as some foam and our material," Whatcott said. "The springs bring some additional complications, and the manufacturing equipment has to be a little more specialized. Kust foam requires less to get started. The springs were something we thought we could do and that the market would be interested in."

Partially sprung mattresses have a little more "bounce" or resilience than a foam-only mattress, and a different feel.

"We don't see a lot of other options that have springs and foam, and there's not really anyone else doing our material," Whatcott said. "It gives us differentiation."

This reintroduction of springs is, at least thus far, an outlier.

"Bed-in-a-box is driving the movement to foam even more quickly," said Doug Todd, North American marketing director for DowDuPont Inc.'s Dow polyurethanes business. "It helps with the shipping and logistics side, but also drives a lot of the comfort relative to the mattress. I think this is the big driver for very strong growth."

About 60 percent of consumers think the mattress drives comfort within their sleep experience, Todd said.

"The majority of those think the materials used in their mattress contribute to the comfort,' he said. 'More than 40 percent look at foam beds as best at delivering comfort, although only 20–25 percent actually use foam beds today. This trend is driving towards more foam."

His colleague Jon Penrice, vice president and global marketing director at Dow polyurethanes, said there is healthy growth for mattresses, and the foams within them.

"Depending on the region it can be 5 percent or even 10 percent growth," he said.

However, mattress preferences are not the same the world over, as Jan Geeraert, plant manager at Latexco NV in Tielt, Belgium, explains.

"For instance, in [continental] Europe, mattresses are thinner and somewhat firmer than they are in the U.S.," he said. "In Europe, people want more support. If you go towards the Far East, then you have even harder mattresses."

But even within Europe, different countries have different preferences. In Germany, higher density foams are preferred, whereas in France the preference is for lower density, harder foams. Standard mattress dimensions vary between countries, too.

"We produce a continuous block and then cut it to the width we need," he said. "If we need 1.96 meters or 1.76 meters for France, or in Spain we need 1.5 meters, we can do that in one production run and cut to the exact dimensions of the block."

Foam density and hardness is only part of the comfort story. There are three areas in Dow's comfort science initiative, Todd said.

"There's the temperature side, so the microclimate, [and] ergonomics and the support side and a third area that is more difficult to quantify, the sensation – the overall feel of the materials," he said. "With bed-in-a-box in particular, when it comes to support, how do you drive something that is comfort-oriented? How do you provide resiliency without having too much of a trade-off on keeping comfortable through the night without impacting temperature and cooling? We've been looking at the chemistry to try and provide more airflow."

Cooling gels or coatings give an instant cooling sensation.

"That is important because it has been linked to falling asleep quicker," Todd said. "But you want to stay cool, and some of the ways that provide an instant cool don't last throughout the night. We've been doing a lot of work on that."

Another challenge is delivering good recovery in the foam, the feeling when the consumer sinks into the mattress, but it still gives good support.

"If it recovers too fast – it is too firm – you don't get that feeling," Todd said. "How do you get good recovery so it stays like a viscoelastic-type foam, but still get good breathability and airflow?"

It also has to feel consistent in different climates.

In the past four or five years, Latexco's Geeraert said, there has been a move towards more hybrid mattresses, combining layers with different functionalities. "People don't only want a support layer, they also want an energy transition layer, they want a memory foam layer, and so on," he said. "For that you need to build your mattress up out of different layers. Mattresses are getting somewhat thicker than they were, but for bed-in-a-box systems it's really important that they combine different layers."

The layers angle has really changed in recent years, he said, with single blocks, or blocks with one layer on top, shifting to more and more layers.

Companies tend to limit the number of mattress types they want to sell via bed-in-a-box. This is so they don't have endless product variation, Geeraert adds. "They tend to build up a mattress of different layers. Typically these have a support layer, the biggest block, on the bottom, with transition or comfort layers on top," he said. "With the lower density materials, especially if they are produced from MDI foams, there can be issues with recovery."

Bed-in-a-box mattresses need very open foams. 'Even our viscoelastic foam is open cell. As soon as it's pulled out of its cover and its vacuum it recovers very rapidly,' he said. 'Every comfort layer we try to make as open cell as possible because you have more air flow and a cooling effect. Memory foam mattresses with more closed cells heat up when you lie on them. New generation memory foams made of polyurethane do not have that.'

Eve uses a combination of visco foams and polyurethane foams, Lobkowicz said, along with some hybrid foams.

"There is always an emphasis on having good densities and open cell, at least with the top layers," he said. "There's some trade-off with density and breathability. But we mainly look for sleep climate-related properties – breathability, humidity, absorbance. And then there's rebound, and the support that can be provided in different ways by different foams. There's always a trade-off between visco, which aligns to your body but then you really sink in, and the kind of rebound support that doesn't allow you to sink in so much. We try to find the right balance."

Although he declined to say who his firm works with, Purple's Whatcott said his company sources foam from a couple of the large manufacturers.

"The big property we test for new vendors, and our current vendors with ongoing quality, is rebound," he said. "The last thing we want to do is ship out a bed-in-a-box mattress and it doesn't open correctly when it is unpacked.

"We like to get as much breathability as we can, we like to have good airflow through our foams. We work with our suppliers to make sure they cut at the right sizes and dimensions. A lot of that comes down to how they cure it, and whether they get a good, solid cure before they begin processing and ship it out to us."

Most of Latexco's PU foams are MDI based, but it also produces TDI foams, notably for global furniture giant Ikea, although bed-in-a-box mattresses are predominantly MDI.

"We focus on the comfort layers, and there you need MDI because those layers are very thin, 3–5 [centimeters]," Geeraert said. "We offer a portfolio of different combinations of hardness and densities of foam, so customers can choose" he added. "Here in Belgium, we have a small continuous line, a J-Flex from Hennecke. We can produce foam blocks the width of the mattress, and then cut out the mattresses."

Latexco also produces different densities, ranging from 35–50 kilograms per meter cubed, and with varying hardnesses. "If you want to deliver all over Europe, you have to have a big portfolio of different qualities."

In the U.S., Limer from Latexco's North American operations said the company is the only producer that pours polyurethane and latex under one roof.

"We do box pours in the U.S., which makes us very customizable," he said. "If the customer wants a tweak here, an additive there, we can do it without having to fire up a huge slabstock line. Also, it's good from an R&D perspective. We don't have to pour 50 feet of foam to find out it didn't behave how we thought it would."

The Middleton, England-bsed Vita Cellular Foams (UK) Ltd. has also been investing in the space. Nick Wood, operations director for Vita's Vitafoam unit, said the bedding market continues to be an area of active development.

"Vita is working proactively with its strategic partners to support the growth in their markets," he said. "Vita has invested significantly in new a foaming plant, Hyflo, with an aim of developing the new mattress market products of tomorrow," Wood said.

The company already is seeing the decision pay off, with several new product launches in the past 12 months.

For a number of reasons, Wood said, the majority of bed-in-a-box designs are 100 percent foam only. There is often one mattress construction per brand, so the feel of mattress has to be high quality and universally appealing. Vita, as an example, has developed a number of foams, including the ReVo brand.

The demands from the bed-in-a-box market for universally appealing comfort has driven both mattress designers, and foam suppliers to innovate. This is happening faster than the traditional market needed. Altering construction materials and methods traditionally gives different mattress properties.

Sustainable raw materials have yet to make much of an impact in the mattress market.

"We see very little consumer interest," Dow's Penrice said. "Even if you have a polyol from a renewable source, you still have an isocyanate from hydrocarbon. Where I see a lot more interest is recycling. This is particularly true in Europe where the 2020 [European Union] directive will reduce the ability of consumers to dispose of mattresses in landfill."

Dow is working with German manufacturer H&S Anlagentechnik to recycle post-consumer mattress foam into polyols. New polyurethanes can be made from these.

A foam-only bed-in-a-box mattress is significantly easier to deconstruct at the end of its life than more traditional mattresses.

Vita's Wood said: "As is the case with any recovered material, any hygiene risk has to be removed prior to that material being reprocessed into another product."

He added that the company has several foams in its portfolio containing material from more sustainable sources.

Eve is open to more sustainable materials, Lobkowicz said, "but with consumers, it's always a tricky story," he said. "Do you want to say this is more sustainable than other foams, or do you want to focus on the fact that it is the best possible product for their back, for durability, for sleep climate? It's a balance."

Purple does everything it can to be sustainable while maintaining product quality, Whatcott said.

"We try to make sure we are conscious of what our impact is," he said. "With the naturally sourced materials, we want to make sure they don't kill the rebound and the foam remains functional. At one point there was an upsurge in soy-based foams, but the soy content was so low then it almost didn't seem to matter. We don't want to do something out of a fad, we want to participate in things that make a difference."

Sustainable materials are more important in Europe than the U.S., according to Latexco's Limer.

"A sustainability story is a differentiator, but that will only help with a percentage of the market," he said. "We aim for zero landfill, and try to recycle all scrap waste into different products. We have a division in Europe that recycles our waste and scrap but that from other manufacturers, into products."

It is impossible to try a bed-in-a-box bought before purchase online, so the makers have to explain the product on a web page, which leads them to talk more about material technology.

"They come to us and ask for an explanation of how the technology works," Penrice said. "It is definitely changing things on the material science front."

Eve's Lobkowicz believes that trial and return is a pretty good solution for both the business and the consumer.

"Only a small proportion of people send it back. I think having the product at home and sleeping on it is better than just lying on it in a shop." he said. "We are a direct-to-consumer business, so the concept makes sense. If you have a lot of stores it is less important, but I think the experience works for the customer."

Feedback from customers who return bed-in-a-box mattresses is used by Eve to help optimize the product. Some returns are sold as refurbished products at a reduced price.

Purple's Whatcott agrees that there is some risk from returns. It has recently started introducing mattresses into Mattress Firm stores in the U.S., so people can try them out in person.

And what of the future? Latexco Belgium's Geeraert thinks that we may see more intelligent mattresses in coming years. Monitoring heart rate or moisture might be possible. It may be possible to automatically tailor hardness and ventilation for better comfort.

"You could make your mattress more intelligent. If it decides there is too much moisture, it can put some ventilation in," he said.

"That, in my opinion, is in the future in the bedding world – the integration of some types of electronics in the mattress. The mattress could respond in an intelligent way to the environment or to the person sleeping on it. But I don't see a replacement for foam in the very near future – we will still be sleeping on foam."