EDIT: Please see Novosbed’s response in post #8 of this thread and further comments after yours.
I 'm having a hard time believing the Novosbed reviews. I suspect the company has spammed the internet with bogus reviews. When you Google Novosbed and dig past the second page, you get to these personal blog sites. All theses personal blog sites are comparing the Tempurpedic mattress to the Novosbed. They are all scripted exactly the same but each have a different date and user name. Also, each review sounds like a Novosbed commercial and they always give the company web site. It just seems fishy to me.
Additional comments by Phoenix:
I have changed the name of this thread to “Novosbed reviews” because it has become the #1 search result for “Novosbed reviews” and the allegations in the thread and the original thread title are unsubstantiated. I have little desire to allow one person’s anonymous opinions on an internet forum who has only posted on the forum twice to cause harm to a legitimate business who is producing some high quality and value mattresses. In many cases these types of posts can even come from competitors looking to cause harm to their competition.
I have talked with Sam Prochazka who is one of the owners of NovosBed on several occasions and he impressed me with his transparency, the quality of the materials they are using in their mattresses, their willingness to disclose every material and component in their mattresses, and with their commitment to providing quality, value, and service to their customers. They have come a long way in the relatively short time they have been in business.
This edit is to make sure that this forum isn’t used as a vehicle for an unsubstantiated and probably inaccurate allegation that could easily be from a competitor to cause harm to a legitimate internet business that is providing good quality and value mattresses to many consumers.
NOTE ADDED JAN, 2016: They have now introduced their new simplified choice mattress which has replaced their previous models and have also become a member of this site.
Did you just call me fake :lol:
I read your review and it was good. Search Google for Novosbed and look at what I’m talking about. I posted my thoughts on this site becuase it was the one I trusted.
Hi khibbard,
I usually take all reviews with a grain of salt anyway (you can see more of my thoughts about reviews in post #13 here) but they are a marketing company that may often ask their customers to post a review so many “suspect” reviews that sound similar would not be unusual in cases like this.
I would always evaluate a mattress on the basis of it’s materials and layering using “apples to apples” comparisons with other similar mattresses rather than paying particular attention to reviews which are mostly written immediately after a sale by people who have little knowledge about the quality of the mattress they just purchased.
I have seen some ebay merchants for example that have over 10,000 positive ratings in the 99% positive area and yet almost none of these realized they were buying a “cheap” memory foam mattress with low quality materials that wasn’t worth any more than they paid for it … and yet they believed that it was comparable to higher priced mattresses … at least initially (when they wrote the review in the excitement of their initial belief in “the deal” they were getting).
These types of reviews that are often about the “deal” they believe they received or to justify a purchase and that seems to populate many online review sites are mostly meaningless anyway IMO because they usually are written soon after a purchase and don’t provide any meaningful or relevant information about the mattress or themselves.
Phoenix
Just kidding. It’s possible that the company planned a few seeds for their product (or in case Amazon, the “vine” program), but most what you see on google are website using “bot” scrapping other sites for content, so you can run a blog without blogging. You can take any popular product on Amazon and goolge reviews, a few page down, you will see tons of review sites duplicating exactly what Amazon has.
It’s not just product reviews, you can find the same pattern for just about anything with slight value on the internet, computer tips, FAQs, howtos, etc. It’s just lucky we are at the source on this one.
Hi whoever,
I should also make clear that my comments about reviews don’t apply to your comments and review here which I certainly appreciate and comes from a more researched and educated source 
Phoenix
Actually I was there counting Amazon reviews not so long ago 
Hi Khibbard,
My name is Sam Prochazka, and I’m one of the founders of Novosbed. Here’s how those rave reviews come to pass:
If a customer orders a mattress before 2:00pm Eastern (noon Mountain) on a business day, we usually ship that day (otherwise first thing on the morning of the next business day). It normally takes 3-7 days to ship, though our warehouses are located in the most populous regions of North America, so often shipping is faster than we estimate.
We monitor all shipments proactively; our staff contacts both our customer and shipping partner (UPS or FED/EX) to resolve issues should they arise.
We contact every customer by phone one week after their mattress has arrived to ensure their satisfaction with Novosbed. During this call we encourage them to write reviews about us on the internet.
Over the last 4 months we have asked our customers to review us through the website Reseller Ratings. Prior to this our requests were much less specific, hence reviews being all over the internet.
The vast majority of reviews about Novosbed are excellent, and it’s no accident. We work extremely hard to provide our customers (even those who return their mattresses) with top-notch products and service that they want to tell their friends about.
All the best,
Sam
My wife and I purchased the Novosbed Aria and were immediately surprised how hard/firm it was. We gave it time to adjust, but it hasn’t gotten any better in close to a year. It’s so uncomfortable (and has actually contributed to MORE back pain for me) that we are now selling it for whatever we can get and buying what we should have gotten to begin with.
I guess we should have known to be skeptical right away, when Novosbed “accidentally” charged us a $19.98 foreign transaction fee (which they did refund us for) and tried to get away with sending us two cheap, low-quality pillows (retailing for $30) in place of the $109 contour pillows that were advertised. This whole process was highly bizarre, although they finally did send the right pillows a mere 5 months later.
It almost feels like they intentionally made us wait really long on the pillows until our return window passed, because we did want to feel the whole Novosbed package altogether. Unfortunately, it wasn’t worth the wait or the money, and we hugely regret giving them our business.
Hi mlueck1,
I’m sorry to hear that your Novosbed mattress didn’t work out for you as well as you hoped and about your experience with the pillows as well. They are based in Canada so I believe the $18.95 fee is the result of an “international” transaction fee that the payment system charges on some occasions that they refund when it happens to a US customer.
I don’t completely understand however why you are as unhappy as you are with Novosbed or have made some of the allegations or implications that you have. They use high quality materials in their mattress and have good value and you had the foresight with an online purchase to order a mattress that has a great return policy. It seems reasonable to me that if your mattress wasn’t working out once it was getting close to the end of your trial that you would have initiated a return of the mattress which would have cost you nothing and if I was in your shoes … in all fairness … I would be upset with my own choices more than with Novosbed.
It’s not possible for an online business to be right every time about which mattress is most suitable for every customer or that meets their preferences even though everyone involved may do their best to help you make the best choice possible and while I understand your frustration … your choice to keep it and that you now need to sell it has little to do with the quality or value of the mattress or with Novosbed’s policies and more with your responsibility in letting the trial period pass without initiating a return once it was clear that the mattress wasn’t the most suitable choice for you.
Phoenix
Seems like an odd, one-sided reply Phoenix. Interesting that you completely gloss over 1/2 my post, which was pointing out the strange (unethical?) business practice of shipping completely different pillows than the ones advertised. In reading other reviews, it sounds like we are not the only ones to receive the subpar substitute pillows. Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing for me to point out that if they cut corners in one area, one can call into question what else is going on.
By the way, I never complained about Novosbed’s return policy in my post, so not sure where you got that from. Simply said that this was advertised as a softer mattress that suggests giving it time to break in and it never broke in for us. Also, I guess we weren’t fortunate enough to receive the complimentary call from Novosbed to hear about how things were working out for us. Again, probably related to our ongoing conversations we were forced to have with them to remedy our pillow situation. While the trial period is reasonable, it really isn’t that long of a time to test out a mattress, determine whether worsening back conditions are related to the bed or something else, etc. It takes time to put together that conclusion, and I’ve only recently become certain it is the Novosbed mattress that has been causing me back pain after we slept on a different mattress for a week and the pain relieved quite a bit. Please drop your negative and accusatory tone next time you reply to me.
Hi mlueck1,
I realize you didn’t complain about their return policy … but it seems to me based on the tone and implications of your post that you are trying to find reasons to “blame” them for a decision which was ultimately yours (not to return the mattress inside the trial period) and then using implications about their ethics or intent to “build your case” or justify your disappointment.
Had you returned your mattress near the end of your trial period when it was clear that the mattress wasn’t working out for you (and their trial period is 4 months which is plenty of time to assess a mattress) which I think would have been the most reasonable course of action … I would think that the tone of your review would likely have been decidedly different. While you would have had to start over again, which is never the ideal outcome, you wouldn’t have had to sell the mattress and you would have tried a mattress that didn’t work out without any financial risk involved. It would likely also have been different if the mattress had worked out for you and there is no way to know this ahead of time with any certainty because the feel and performance of a mattress has so many subjective elements that what is too firm for one can be too soft for another. This is the reason for a return policy in the first place.
Nobody is happy when mistakes happen and every manufacturer including Novosbed has room to improve when a mistake (such as the pillows) is repeated or becomes a pattern. In most cases these types of mistakes are at their supplier level who is shipping out the package and they may not even know about it until they have complaints if their supplier is making the mistake although they are still responsible for it and if it took 5 months to correct this then that would clearly be an area that they needed to improve. I seriously doubt though that it was intentional or some kind of deceptive way to stop a customer from returning a mattress since any reputable business would realize that these types of mistakes or tactics would cost them much more than anything they may gain by substituting pillows when either way it’s not a significant part of their cost. It would be like saying a customer went past their trial period just so they could write a negative review … it would make no sense and would go against their own self interests.
I realize that this may not be what you may want to hear but it is my opinion and I am not one of those that believes that consumers are always right or that their “reviews” are always appropriate, reasonable, or balanced. This is also not a typical “review” site where consumers can come here to post what I consider to be “unbalanced” reviews without a reply that also includes the parts of a purchase that consumers are responsible for as well or makes comments on the parts of their review that I believe aren’t accurate or are misleading.
The goal of all the information on this site is so that others that come behind you can replace hindsight with foresight and can learn from the knowledge, experience, and mistakes of others. Those who read this will certainly be able to decide for themselves whether they would have been as unhappy with their purchase as you are if they had returned the mattress.
In your case … Novosbed certainly made some mistakes, and one of them (the pillows) took too long to correct … but in all fairness I believe you did as well.
Phoenix
Well I’m certainly not going to hijack this thread and continue the back and forth, but to clarify yet again, I did not post here to seek personal comfort and support for this negative situation like you seem to be suggesting. I posted to inform others to be careful about dealing with a company where what you think you are getting may be decidedly different than what you are actually getting, whether it be the firmness level of a mattress (somewhat subjective) or the actual product advertised like the pillows (totally objective).
To be clear, the pillow situation was not an innocent mix-up (as you’re so eager to suggest), it was false advertisement, as the company informed me after I complained that the pillows they advertised in fact did not even exist. The five month window for a resolution was actually for them to manufacture pillows they did not even have, despite still choosing to advertise fancy non-existent ones as part of the package deal (knowing full well they would just send some cheap knock offs). I’m sure most people just thought nothing of it, since, hey, free pillows are free pillows, but it is unacceptable to falsely advertise products, plain and simple. So maybe people (not you obviously) can understand why I’d be hesitant to trust this type of company’s return policy, where I was worried we’d somehow get stuck with some kind of charge and have nothing to show for it. So, to refute your latest out-of-touch assumption (you sure seem to love offering your own baseless insights), even if they had accepted the return and I lost zero dollars, I absolutely would have held onto my negative perceptions and warned others about Novosbed.
And one last thing, while you chastise others for being subjective, how about you not make your own blanket statements, like decreeing that four months is definitively the maximum amount of time someone would need to make up their mind about a mattress. Especially when completely switching over to a new type of foam mattress, these things take time. Furthermore, to isolate aches and pains as being attributable to the new mattress vs a change in activity or a change in stress or diet or any number of things (in my case these were all new variables around the time I got the mattress), I would appreciate you not playing God about what is and is not plausible.
That’s all from me and how about it being all from you, too, so that people can read what has been exchanged and decide for themselves if this is they type of company they want to do business with. If you re-read my original comment, all I was doing was warning people about the fact that Novosbed practices dishonesty, whether people see the pillow issue as large or small. Please spare me your diatribe about what “I want to hear”, because radio silence from you would be lovely.
Hi mlueck1,
I’ve said what I wanted to say as have you and while you are misrepresenting what I’ve said to you … and I still believe that your “review” isn’t completely balanced or reasonable … I do agree with you that any others that read this can certainly make up their own minds so I’m happy to leave it as it is.
Phoenix
Hi Mlueck1,
I’m sorry to hear that you are not satisfied with your Aria. We’re in business to make 100% of our customers happy, whether or not they keep their Novosbeds. Usually people return their Novosbeds for a full refund within the 4 month trial period. If you are 12 months out and not enjoying your sleep the way the vast majority of our customers do, that is not acceptable to us.
We will try to find your purchase record and contact you based on the information you have provided in this post. In the meantime, you can email us at [email protected]. You can also call us at 1-877 496 3626. or on live chat during business hours (Mon. to Sat., 8-5pm Mountain Time).
I will track the progress on your case personally. We’ll make this right for you.
Sincerely,
Sam
CEO, Novosbed
Update: I’m willing to believe my experience was an anomaly. After posting my review, Novosbed did follow up about my dissatisfaction and attempt to get to the bottom of the issue. Turns out our mattress had a manufacturing defect that was at the root of the problem.
The CEO directly apologized for the inconvenience and expressed his desire to make things right both in word and action - he arranged for the mattress to be donated and our money refunded even though we were outside of the trial window - and as a gesture of goodwill allowed us to keep the pillows we had waited so long for.
So, even though this did not work out for us, I have no hard feelings. Since our bed was not true to form I guess I cannot really comment one way or another on their mattresses and so my only recommendation would be to make sure you are receiving the advertised pillows and let them know immediately if you have any concerns with anything, as their customer service is top notch.
Hi mlueck1,
Thanks for the update on your situation and letting us know the final outcome … I appreciate it
It’s good to see that things worked out well for you.
Phoenix
Good afternoon everyone,
I never thought I would purchase a bed online but after doing what I think is pretty good due diligence, I made a purchase from Novos Bed. My bed arrives on 6/18/2014 so I will keep you updated on how I sleep. I can tell you the customer service is awesome. I never felt pressured to buy their product but instead they gave me insightful info on the firmness, how I sleep etc. Gail and Caitlin were great to deal with. I placed my order on 6/14 and was shipped that day. My total invoice amount was $1458.00 with no tax or shipping. I purchased a king size Aria bed and foundation.
SH
Hi shaehnel,
Thanks for the feedback about Novosbed and for letting us know what you ended up choosing … and congratulations on your new mattress
I hope you have the chance to share an update once you receive it and have had the chance to sleep on it for a bit.
Phoenix
Good morning all,
As expected, my Novos bed arrived yesterday in two large, heavy boxes. I am sure the fedex driver was not too happy! The packaging was good and they take extra care when sending the mattress. It is sent rolled up with thick plastic protecting it. It took me about 30 minutes to put the foundation together but not hard at all. I was truly skeptical that a king size bed could fit in the box they sent but it did. Everything was ready to go in less than 40 minutes.
The bed is extremely comfortable. I believe one reviewer thought it was more firm than expected and I believe that is the case. I like a firmer bed than most (when I use a sleep number bed I set it between 90-100) and Kaitlin suggested the Aria would be the right bed for me. If feels very similar to my sealy posturepedic I replaced. Just a little cushion when you lay down but you do not sink into the bed. I did not notice that it slept “warmer” than my inner spring mattress. There was absolutely no odor to the bed.
I must agree with the poster that discussed the pillows that are sent free. They are similar to the tempur pedic but not the same quality. The tempur pedic pillows are very heavy to me and these are really light.
I will update again next week.
SH