A Mattress at $33,000?
by Anjali Athavaley
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Mary Pat Wallace, owner of Hastens' Chicago, poses on the Vividus ultra-luxe bed that retails for $49,500.
Made with horsehair, silk and gold, new bedding pushes prices sky-high.
How much would you spend for a good night's sleep?
Some people might say $33,000. That's the price of E.S. Kluft & Co.'s hand-tufted, king-size Palais Royale mattress and box spring, currently the most expensive American-made mattress set on the market. The company says it has sold about 100 since introducing it in 2008.
Or maybe it's $44,000 -- the price tag on Kluft's Sublime model, which the company has teed up for a launch later this year.
European shoppers will pay even more. At $69,500 -- roughly the price of a Porsche Cayenne S hybrid SUV -- there's the Vividus king-size mattress set from Hastens Sangar AB, of Sweden. Hastens says it takes 160 hours to assemble this mattress entirely by hand, which has a Swedish-pine frame with thick layers of horsehair, cotton, flax and wool inside. The company says since introducing the mattress in 2006, it has sold 250 of them world-wide.
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There's an arms race under way in the world of luxury mattresses that jittery economists and sluggish home sales seem unable to stop. Even at the middle-to-upper-middle tiers, mattress prices are creeping up as companies cater to mainstream demand for luxurious sleep.
At Sealy Corp., in Trinity, N.C., the lineup of products aimed at the luxury end of the market is expanding, says Jodi Allen, chief marketing officer. The company's higher-end Stearns & Foster mattresses range in price from $1,200 to $5,000 and take twice as long to make as the company's Sealy-brand mattress.
This year, Sealy launched its most expensive Stearns & Foster model, the black-and-gold Golden Elegance, priced at $4,999 for a king set. It features individually wrapped inner and outer coils, which give extra support, and it contains wool, horsehair and natural latex inside.
Earl Kluft, chief executive of E.S. Kluft, a family-owned company based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., says it takes 10 craftsmen about three days to make the Palais Royale, which contains 10 layers and more than 10 pounds of cashmere, mohair, silk and New Zealand wool that has been washed, dried and crimped. Natural latex foam and certified organic cotton are among the materials used to reduce motion transfer and provide cooling. The Sublime has a layer of horsehair for resiliency.
"We really want the consumer to get a better night's sleep," Mr. Kluft says. "When you think about it, the mattress is the most important thing in your house. You spend more time on your bed than anywhere else."
Mr. Kluft says super-premium mattresses, or those costing $20,000 or more, made up 5% of Kluft's sales of $33 million in 2009, a year when overall sales were flat. In 2010, first-quarter sales were up 50% over the year earlier, Mr. Kluft says.
At the high end, other mattress options range from Hollandia International's "3-D fabric," with raised fibers creating ventilation, to a customizable mattress from Organic Mattresses Inc., featuring layers of latex in varying firmness that are stacked to suit the customer. Some mattresses have aloe vera or lavender built into the top layers; a luxury mattress from Magniflex, an Italian line, is covered with fabric containing 22-karat gold.
Exactly how much better will a person sleep on a super-expensive mattress, a shopper might ask. Not much, according to one sleep expert, Clete Kushida, medical director of the Stanford University Sleep Medicine Center. "For the vast majority of people who are generally healthy, bed surface won't make much of a difference in terms of their sleep," Dr. Kushida says.
But as people age, they experience more sleeping problems and become more attuned to the comfort of their beds. And for those with medical problems, such as chronic pain syndrome, "even something as simple as a bed surface can make a significant difference," he says.
Yet bad sleep was what drove Scott Kimple, a 44-year-old hedge-fund manager in Dallas, to invest $27,500 in a king-size Hastens 2000T mattress set two years ago. "I've had problems sleeping in the last couple of years, and I thought well, maybe a mattress might help," Mr. Kimple says.
"When I heard there was a $20,000 mattress out there, I thought it was kind of ridiculous." But Mr. Kimple is a convert. "It's light years better than anything I've ever slept on. It's like you're floating on air." An added plus: "They will come to your house and flip the mattress for you," Mr. Kimple says. The Hastens store in Dallas offers the monthly service to local customers for the first year; Mr. Kimple had it done.
Less-expensive rivals are skeptical of a $20,000 mattress. "I don't know what the rationale is, quite frankly, as to why someone would spend that much," says Rick Anderson, North American division president at Tempur-Pedic International Inc., of Lexington, Ky. The company is planning this year to roll out the Tempur-Cloud Luxe collection, including a softer version of its signature Tempur foam, which conforms, with body heat, to the shape of the sleeper. A king set with an advanced adjustable base system costs $9,000 -- making it the company's second-most-expensive.
"Hand-made doesn't necessarily mean better sleep," Mr. Anderson adds. "I think you have to look for meaningful differences."
The industry offers a little evidence to back up the notion that a new bed will help you sleep better. In 2006, the Better Sleep Council, an arm of the International Sleep Products Association, funded a study at Oklahoma State University. Researchers divided 59 people, who had no clinical history of sleep problems, into groups according to their "sleep efficiency" -- that is, how well they reported sleeping. They recorded their quality of sleep for 28 days in their old beds, which were on average nine years old. Then they did the same for 28 days in a new, medium-firm bed.
Subjects with poor sleep efficiency experienced greater improvement, but those with good sleep efficiency also experienced benefits, says Bert Jacobson, head of the School of Educational Studies at OSU. "A new bed is certainly not a cure-all," Dr. Jacobson says, but it can improve the sleep of even those who don't feel they suffer from poor sleep.
And that may be why, in the luxury mattress business, unhappy customers are rare. Last year, Linda Wilde, 51, a hospital health information official, and her husband, Wayne, an administrator at a law firm, set out to replace the mattress she'd been sleeping on since the year Ronald Reagan was elected president (1980, to be exact).
"It was a full size mattress, and we are two full-size people," Ms. Wilde says. "It was time we got a new mattress." The couple went to a mattress store near their home in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and tried out a Kluft. They glanced at the price and saw $1,700. "When we laid on that bed, it was like heaven," she says. "We were thinking, What a steal."
Make that $17,000. But it was already too late -- the Wildes were sold. Since purchasing the bed, her husband's back pain has vanished. Ms. Wilde says she doesn't intend to buy another mattress. "This is the bed we're going to die in," she says. "Hopefully not soon."
For some, the eye-popping price is part of the appeal. "For any luxury brand, there has to be a perception of scarcity," says Dean Crutchfield, senior partner at Method Inc., a New York brand consulting firm. "If everyone was running around buying these beds, they wouldn't be as special.
"Let's be honest, not everyone can have this. Not everyone can afford this. That's what this is about," Mr. Crutchfield says.
Bloomingdale's, a unit of Macy's Inc., currently offers Mr. Kluft's Palais Royale in several stores. Just a few years ago, the company's mattress assortment topped out in the $5,000-to-$6,000 range.
"Once my buyers started testing the stuff and we saw the results, we went very aggressively after that business," says Joe Laneve, the retailer's senior vice president of home furnishings.
Customers who buy a $33,000 mattress want to take their time in the store. "They lie down for a long time," Mr. Laneve says. Kluft trains the sales associates -- Mr. Kluft calls them "disciples of the product" -- to answer questions. "We do not pressure them to make a quick decision of that magnitude," Mr. Laneve says.
Fidel Lecer, manager of a Mancini's Sleepworld store in San Francisco, says the most expensive mattresses sell themselves. Just a few days ago, he recalls, a woman walked in looking to spend less than $1,000 on a mattress-box spring combination; she walked out with a set that cost her $8,000.
"There's no one, in 95% of the cases," Mr. Lecer says, "that comes in and says 'Oh, I'm here to spend $15,000.' "