I had a very good experience trying out a naturepedic EOS trilux in a show room. I’m looking at doing Soft-Medium-Firm on my side, Firm-Firm-Frim for my wife. It’s a bit out of price range though.
I’m interested in the 10" Sleep EZ Natural latex mattress in split queen, which looks very similar online- also offering selection of firmness on three separate latex layers. It’d be about 40% savings.
Can anyone comment on how these mattresses compare, or offer other advice about how to decide between on-line v in-store? Can I assume that SleepEZ and naturepedic approximately agree on what “soft” “medium” and “firm” mean? I’d love to save some money and I’ve heard such good things about SleepEZ on this forum, but I also feel some obligation to the naturepedic showroom without which I wouldn’t have been able to try the latex out, and I do like having a physical location to drive to in case of any issues.
Hi Dreens and welcome to the forums! It sounds like you’re looking for feedback from forum members, but I’d like to chime in with a couple of quick points anyway - you can compare the firmness of our layers with the firmness of their layers by comparing the ILD rating, which is basically a number assigned to the firmness of the layers. For both Talalay and Dunlop, our soft is 19-22 ILD, medium is 30-32 ILD, firm is 37-40 ILD, and extra firm is 44 ILD. If their ILD ratings are similar, then the firmness of the layers would be comparable.
Regarding your question on trying in store versus trying online - we use our almost 50 years of experience to make very accruate recommendations for our customers, to the point that we have only a 10% layer exchange rate and 4% return rate (and the industry average for mattress returns is 15-20%). And most of our customers order from us without ever having laid on a latex mattress. However, customer in the Phoenix area actually have a 7% return rate and 12% layer exchange rate, which seems to indicate that customers that visit our showroom have a higher return rate than customers that order online. I feel like this is attributed to the customers picking their layers based on their brief showroom experience instead of just relying on our recommendations. So believe it or not, laying on the mattress in a showroom seems to lead to a higher return rate and layer exchange rate.
Thanks so much for your reply! I’m a scientist and so appreciate seeing real data! I think there’s a chance that some of the effect observed could be attributable to consumers being more willing to go ahead with a swap when they have a store that they can access. But I can see that if ordering online translated into a significantly increased risk of choosing the layers incorrectly, we would’ve expected to see those numbers flipped.
I certainly appreciate the insights! Some other things to keep in mind - for local returns we pick the mattress up, and for returns out of the delivery area, we also have the mattress picked up, so I don’t think the return rates are affected by local customers having an easier return process. For local layer exchanges, we only charge $30 per exchange within the trial period, but for customers outside of the Phoenix area, we charge $30 for the first exchange and the full cost of shipping for any subsequent exchanges within the trial period, but I only counted the exchange rate based on whether or not a customer requested a layer exchange, and didn’t count multiple exchanges. I did it this way because I was more interested in seeing how many customers exchanged a layer, and not how many exchanges it took to get the mattress right. Also, I did not analyze whether or not a customer did a layer exchange before they decided to return the mattress. I just mention these things so you have a bigger picture of the data.
That definitely increases my confidence in the results. I’ll let you know how it works out for us, our natural latex Queen has been ordered! Based on the data you provided, we decided to go with a different layer stack for my wife. Showroom experience at naturepedic suggested triple firm, but your height/weight calculator suggested med/med/firm, and since online orders are less often exchanged despite comparable difficulty of doing so we figured we’d learn from that and trust the calculator halfway by ordering med/firm/firm.