Hi UrbanAdverturer,
just looked into this after your suggestion, and I am seriously concerned. I am just after a lot of research into the Eve, even went to their place and met them, after pushing the US-based chat line Customer Service to let me know where i could test it without undergoing the ordeal of the home trial - personal preference, as I dislike wasting anyone’s time, including mine, if I know I can test the thing somewhere - so she told me where they are based. which actually can be retrieved from their website as well, It’s in London in Highbury and Islington - I later realised.
anyway,
more of this later, as this is not what i wanted to report on here.
the point is that my long research into the eve - i feel - has provided me with a certain sensitivity to their product and marketing, and after learning on here about the latest marketing strategies by such companies, including eve’s own people’s GroupOn adventures and misadventures recently, I am absolutely alarmed by how shockingly similar the One seems to be to the Eve. everything about the one website is similar - i would even say identical - to the eve website, have you not noticed?
if One really were a company trying to create their own niche in the market, they’d want to differentiate themselves from eve, would they not? and not reproduce a website whose only variation is the use of a different main colour than yellow! everything else is the same, including the animated GIFs!
I urge you to compare their websites. I bet you it is the same people behind a slightly differently packaged/marketed product.
and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more mattresses and brands popping up in the near future, in this same way.
consider this (and this is what I hinted at earlier): when I arrived at the eve’s headquarters, in a somewhat decaying building, upon opening the door I see some 40 people in an open plan, one-room office, all sitting at their PC desks.
I am in sales myself, i have calculated that the eve company and my own company basically have to have more or less the same amount of sales/revenue/costs per year. (Long story, but please bear with me). Yet there are 5 people at my company, only 2 of whom managing the whole of the sales.
I asked myself, why the hell does a company boasting about cutting the middle man etc etc, selling only one specific defined product, need 40 people? They don’t manufacture it. some company does it for them. Those 40 people were only the marketing/sales side of eve.
…precisely! call me paranoid, but i wouldn’t be surprised if those 40 people all sitting intently at their computers were doing precisely that, i.e. marketing, in the varied and articulate clever ways that this website has described so well on here. Might look like they’re creating this net of presumably competing mattress retailers so that consumers have a sense of sieving through the infinite number of choices and are comforted by their own thought that they’ve thought about it long and hard, and they’re now ready to purchase what they’ve come to believe is the better choice for them. In reality it is the same bloody company, diversifying itself and “packaging” its products differently; but the money only ends up in one bank account.
I hope I am wrong, but there is too much evidence out there - and on this great forum - to support (or at least to not dismiss) such possibility more than to support the opposite, I’m afraid.
Time will tell.
I am certainly grateful to paddyB, and this forum, because I nearly fell into the same trap and was minutes form buying the eve. and by the way, I happen to have had the same experience of it (they let me try one they had in that office for 10 minutes), it felt too firm for me. Stable and positively sturdy, yes, but not yielding where you feel you need it to. Not soft/comfy. Or even better: not different at all in feel and support and comfort than the , e.g., silentnight, which you can now get for £83 from amazon (and habitat were happy to price-match it). Now compare the eve’s £350 to £83? something’s up, I say. (and btw I am not praising the silentnight - I do think that one is like a “toy mattress”, a cheap thing that feels just that, cheap).
Thank you, too, adverturer, and good luck, good luck all.
