Hi gotobed,
Tuft & Needle and SleepEZ have no relationship to each other and are completely separate companies.
SleepEZ has been an independent manufacturer for decades and probably longer than the founders of Tuft & Needle have been alive while Tuft & Needle is a reseller and doesn’t have their own factory. They are made in different factories.
Their mattresses are also completely different from each other as well as you can see in post #2 of this topic about all the “simplified choice” mattresses.
While both of them would make good quality/value choices and there are no lower quality materials or “weak links” in either of them … the Kiss Mattress has a more sophisticated design and uses Talalay latex in the top layer and then uses a 4 lb high performance polyfoam as a transition layer which is a hybrid foam that has many of the properties of memory foam in terms of pressure relief, point elasticity, and “feel” but is a more resilient and faster responding and less temperature sensitive than memory foam so it doesn’t have the typical slow response of most memory foams which some people don’t like because of how it can restrict motion or affect some of the “other” activities that can happen on a mattress (see post #2 here). It also uses a 2 lb density support core underneath them.
The Tuft & Needle uses a 3" layer of 2.8 lb high perfornance polyfoam that also has some “localized” bounce and good point elasticity as well (although it’s not as resilient as latex) on top of a slightly lower density 1.8 lb support core so it’s a simpler design that uses a little lower quality and less costly materials than the Kiss Mattress but of course it’s also in a lower budget range.
I have no idea what it is about Arizona that 4 of the members here are based there and I’ve always thought that was an unusual coincidence as well. There have been a number of members that have mentioned or asked about it over the years of course but I’ve used the online username “Phoenix” since long before this site even existed as an idea and dating back to the days of online bulletin boards and for me it represents the mythological bird that “rises up out of the ashes” … not the city.
Phoenix