I live in a small town in Louisiana with zip code 70586. My wife wants a memory foam mattress and is amenable to which i choose. She liked the feel of the Serta icloud and the Tempur-Contour Signature.
In reading the site is seems that your first suggestion is usually a custom made factory direct mattress. I am confident that you can point me in the right direction much quicker than i can find it. It would be like me trying to reinvent the wheel while you have already made jet planes.
I have about $1500-2000 I can spend, but its not my goal to spend more than necessary to get a mattress that lasts 10-15 years and not necessarily all of it.
My wife and I are in our 30s, so health issues are not really the reason we are looking for one. Its more about an upgrade to a king size bed. The only issue i see potentially is that my wife is a hot sleeper. I, personally, dont notice much difference in mattresses.
My first suggestion is normally to read post #1 here and the general information it links to. This will give you the basic information you need about mattresses and will help you eliminate the worst choices and focus on the better ones.
I’m not so sure I would suggest a custom made mattress for most people (it would normally be more costly than a standard model and wouldn’t be necessary for most) but I would certainly suggest smaller local or independent manufacturers that are either sold factory direct or through better sleep shops. These are usually the source of the best quality and value no mater what your budget or specific needs and preferences and also generally have the kind of knowledge and experience that can provide you with the help and guidance you need in making the best possible choices. These are the types of merchants that will put your best interests above their own.
Many of these will also do custom builds but in most cases this isn’t necessary.
While there aren’t any local manufacturers right in Ville Platte, LA … there are in Lafayette and in Baton Rouge and even though they are a drive away … I would certainly suggest a call to talk to them about your criteria and the preferences you know about and then I would visit the ones that you were most attracted to based on your phone conversations.
The time spend driving will probably be much better spent than the time you would otherwise spend testing mattresses in local stores only to find that the mattresses you are testing don’t have the information available you need to make informed decisions or have much lower quality and value (and a quick search didn’t turn up any local options that would be particularly attractive to me anyway).
I spoke on the phone to “Scott” at http://www.irwinsmattressmart.com. I told him which tempurpedic mattress we liked. He told me he could get the specs on that mattress and make one like it. He quoted me a price of $1,799.00 for a King set. In looking at tempurpedic’s website, the same set is just under $4,000.00. My wife is skeptical of such a price difference.
I offered to just order and pay for it over the phone, and he refused. I feel good in that “Scott” did not want to make the mattress without us coming into the store and feeling what it should feel like prior to his making it.
Am I on the right track here? I was ready to just have him make it, but is this the kind of treatment that you hear success stories from? Thanks.
There are many manufacturers that can approximate the Tempurpedic line for about half the cost using similar quality layering and materials. Tempurpedic uses mostly (but not all) good quality materials but they are significantly overpriced compared to many other manufacturers that make similar quality mattresses that sell for much less. Post #2 here may be worth reading.
The way to know for certain is to compare the density and thickness of the foams in the Tempurpedic with the ones they are using. This is a typical example though of the “value” of a good local manufacturer.
I would also commend him on this (local manufacturers don’t want returns because their reputation replaces the advertising of larger brands and they can operate at much smaller profit margins because of this) and I also commend you for realizing that this is a sign of their integrity.
Yes … you are very much on the right track. Based on my conversations with them they are what I call “mattress people” and this is exactly the type of factory direct manufacturer that I would love to work with. The quality and value they provide is typically much better than anything you would find at a mass market retailer or with a larger mainstream brand (as you have seen) and they have the kind of knowledge and experience that can help their customers make better choices both in terms of quality and value and in terms of choosing a mattress that would be suitable for their needs and preferences.
You are definitely heading in the right direction and working with good people IMO
