We Recently Updated Our Pricing

As of Tuesday November 18th, 2014, we’ve increased our prices on most of our models. This price increase ranges anywhere from 10-25% depending on the model. Some of our customers have written in asking why we’ve increased our prices so we wanted to take the opportunity to explain.

We’re all about transparency as a company so here we go! We apologize in advance as this is an incredible amount of information. We just want to be as honest as possible and give you all of the details (something we should have done in the first place.)

This past Tuesday, we started shipping a new version of our mattress. We’ve been working over the past year to develop a new type of foam. For years, the industry has had the same three options in foam: Memory Foam, Latex Foam and Poly Foam.

Before Tuesday, we used poly foam. All three have their pros and cons. And for years, mattress companies have tried to layer them on top of each other to realize the benefits of each. It honestly just doesn’t work.

While we used our poly foam, we heard a few complaints from customers. Not many, but they kept us awake at night nonetheless. So we set out to address these.

The new foam we’ve created is truly unique. We partnered with some of the best manufacturers in the United States and created it from scratch. We’re not big fans of gimmicky names but I can tell you that we are the only place that offers this new formulation.

The biggest innovation in the foam is that it is more comfortable for more people. If you have our current foam and find it comfortable, this foam wouldn’t feel like much of an improvement. But for anyone in the past who has returned our foam for being too firm or too soft, we’ve devised a way to provide different levels of comfort to different individuals. We’re now able to set the firmness for individuals of any weight, independent of each other, without making different versions of our mattress. This makes the shopping experience easier for our customers (one bed to pick from) and reduces our overhead.

The new foam also has a new technology we call localized bounce. Memory foam is great in that you won’t feel your partner moving around. The downside is that it feels like quick sand when you try to roll over. Our new foam is both responsive and pressure relieving. It’s like that old commercial where someone would put a wine glass on the bed and drop a bowling ball on the other-side and the glass wouldn’t move. The only problem was the bowling ball wouldn’t bounce. On our foam, it will.

The final innovation is better pressure relief. Again, for owners of our current foam who find it comfortable, they’re not missing out by not owning the new foam. But for the customers who chose to return their mattresses for being too firm, they would likely find our new foam to be extremely comfortable.

There are only two downsides to this foam. It’s heavier and it costs A LOT more to make. The heavier piece doesn’t have an impact on the consumer, except that the box it ships in is slightly heavier to lift when you first move it in. After that, it won’t have any impact on comfort. It’s also no heavier than a traditional mattress. It is heavier than our previous version though.

We’re using this foam on the top 30% of the mattress. Using it all the way through would cost way too much and does absolutely nothing for comfort. (The same way a box spring has little to no impact on comfort level.) Just how much more expensive is this new foam? It’s three times the cost of the old foam we were using.

The good news is that foam is only part of the cost of our mattress, and in this case, only 30%, of part of that cost, has increased in price by 3x. This is where you saw price increases of up to 25%.

One of our customers made a good point that our king size mattress price increased more than the rest, up to 25%. The reason for this is the increase in weight was most profound on our king size mattress. FedEx charges us based on three factors when shipping a mattress. How much it weighs, how much space (cubic volume) it occupies and how far it travels. The king size mattresses now costs more to ship than our old king size mattresses. The increase in price related to shipping was relatively higher for the king size mattresses compared to the rest of our models.

All of this is a long way of saying that our price increase only reflects our increased cost for making this new product.

Some people might argue that this is still our fault for not setting our prices with enough cushion in the first place to handle increasing costs of manufacturing. Or that if we were developing this product over the course of the year, we could have slowly introduced price increases over time.

We whole-heartedly disagree. One of our core values as a company is to charge fair and transparent pricing. It would be completely unfair (in our opinion) to charge our customers a higher price before this new product arrived. We wanted to ensure that only those individuals who got our new foam, paid a higher price.

We’ve operated our company with the same margin since we started. It’s modest and is enough to cover our costs, pay our employees competitive wages, manufacture in America and continue to innovative on our product.

Our goal was never to create the cheapest product. It was to create a product of superior value. We’re not blind to the fact that this was a significant price increase. That being said, our goal from day one has been to make the best mattress in the world, at a fair price. We truly believe that this new version is a major step in reaching that goal.

We back all of this up with our 30-day return policy. You can return the mattress for any reason at absolutely no cost to you. No questions asked.

Next week, we will also be announcing that we are increasing our warranty to 10 years. This will apply to new as well as existing customers. We stand behind the quality of our mattress and are always looking for ways to increase the value we provide to consumers.

I hope this helps provide some clarity on why we chose to increase our prices. We really do appreciate all of our customers’ feedback. If we’re putting ourselves in your shoes, we agree these price increases could be a bit surprising. If you have any other questions, we’re always standing by.

We’ve said it before but we want to re-iterate that we’re grateful for all of your feedback. Our customers have called us out before (Why are your products $299 and not $300?) and we’re only better because of it.

• The Tuft & Needle Family