After much research and shopping - including buying a mattress from another company for $1800, one that we simply gave away because it didn’t work for us, and the seller had no comfort warranty - we settled on a Select Foam mattress. We were set on getting a Tempurpedic Cloud Luxe in King size, but decided to give Select Foam a chance based on their claims and their stated warranty (refund or replacement with the corresponding Tempur mattress). We completed our purchase at the end of October last year. While my initial report was favorable, the mattress has definitely softened a great deal as time passes, and is anything but comfortable.
People who have followed my earlier posts about this mattress after it had arrived will remember that I have said there is no way that this mattress would be confused with any Tempur mattress. Absolutely no way. This mattress has no memory foam feel whatsover.
As we approached the end of our 90 day comfort warranty, we contacted Select Foam to let them know that this mattress did not meet our expectations and wanted to exercise our rights under their return policy. We were told by Juan at Select Foam that many people found the wool fire sock to be an impediment to their enjoyment of the mattress. We were told to take it off and then give the mattress another chance to break in. I did this.
Two months after that, we were both suffering from increasing back pain. My girlfriend in particular was in agony. Her hips were popping out of place, and she was visiting the chiropractor 2-3 days a week for adjustment. He had to give her a support belt to hold her hips in place while she slept or went about her day. She also suffered from upper back and neck pain, including headaches. She felt she was blessed when she could simply get 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep, and let me tell you, she never did.
After thinking about her problems we came to the realization that they began approximately 3-4 weeks after we received this mattress. Keep in mind that prior to this, aside from the one mattress we had purchased the month before, she had been used to sleeping on a collapsed, worn Tempurpedic classic and presented with none of these problems. We therefore contacted Select Foam by email.
Juan said that we needed to speak with Dwight, so he gave us Dwight’s phone number. My girlfriend spoke with him several times during the course of one week, on the cusp of April/May. Dwight said he wanted us to be happy, so what would work for us? My girl told him she wanted them to honor the warranty and take the mattress back. He agreed to do that, and asked which way we wanted to proceed. She told him she would like to get the Cloud Luxe from Tempur. Dwight said he would check on that.
Some time later we got in touch with him and found that the original Cloud Luxe had been discontinued. He urged us to go to a mattress retailer and see which one we wanted instead. This was towards the end of May.
We checked out the new Tempur lineup and found that the new Cloud Luxe felt nothing like the original one. We weren’t happy with very many of the mattresses offered, with the exception of the Allure, but at $5400, its way out of our league. I called him to let him know we wanted the original Cloud Luxe. Dwight’s answer? He said he’d love to help us but since that mattress was discontinued there was nothing he could do. I told him that while we were shopping we found one local Elite retailer who had stock of 5 of the original Cloud Luxe, so I asked him to take back his Cirrus Luxe and send our money to the retailer, where we would pay the rest. He said what I was asking was far beyond his pay grade to authorize, so he would check “the head office” and get back to me. I waited a week, then called him. When I got him on the phone, after a brief reminder session so he knew which situation he was dealing with. He said, “Ah yes. I haven’t heard back from the main office yet.” So he promised to call back within the day, or the next day at the latest. He didn’t, so I called him several days later. This went on a few times. Finally I got an answer.
About two weeks after I originally posed my question, and another session of refreshing his memory about our case, he said he couldn’t send the money to the other retailer. Anything I bought had to be through them. I asked him if they were a Tempur retailer. Dwight’s response, “MmmHmm.” I couldn’t get him to say the word ‘yes’, just “mmmHmmm”. In any case I thought it was odd that they would insist I go through them if they weren’t a retailer, so evidently they are a Tempur retailer. (That makes sense - why would they go purchase every new Tempur mattress at retail if they were going to rip them apart and reverse engineer them? Much better if they did that at wholesale…)
So he reiterated that they couldn’t help me. I told him then that we wanted our money back. Bear in mind that their comfort warranty offers EITHER the purchase price back OR a Tempur replacement. Option two wasn’t available, so how about option one - a full refund? He said that wasn’t a decision he could make, and he’d have to go to the head office for approval. I told him to go ahead and do that. He promised to call me within the next two days. Of course, I didn’t get a call.
Over the next 2-3 weeks, I would call, he would (sometimes) answer, and tell me that he hadn’t gotten an answer out of “the head office”.
Finally, several months after we’d started this whole ordeal, I told Dwight that I was willing to box the mattress up and drive it to Miami myself, and drop it in their showroom, with my own two hands, provided the “head office” would have a refund check waiting for me. I told him I would do this because this situation has now gone far beyond any comfort situation, and on into medical necessity. He seemed taken aback by this and said he’d certainly pass that on and call me back. He said that he had a meeting the following day with the owner of the company to discuss customer issues, and he would put me at the top of the list.
So of course, you know how that went. I had to call him back myself, because never, not once, did I ever get a call from anyone in the Select Foam operation. In conversation with Dwight he said that he had gotten nowhere with the owner of the company. He said he was very sorry, but there was nothing he could do for me.
Fortunately, my girlfriend saved the phone messages from Dwight (for some reason he had no problem calling her back), and has a great one where he said that they would take this mattress back. So they have recognized that we had a comfort issue, but to date have refused to honor their warranty.
An interesting postscript is that when we hit the six month mark we rotated the mattress, as you should always do with any mattress. Guess what? My girlfriend’s hip problem cleared up almost immediately. Now, I wake up every morning with a sharp, acute pain deep in my pelvis. My new side of the bed is sloppy compared to the other side. Fortunately, I think the difference in hip geometry between the male and female bodies are keeping me from having the problem she had. Still, neither of us sleeps very well at all. I get about 6 hours, she gets about 4. The rest of the time we just turn, trying to find comfort in a bed that offers poor support.
In summary: we have $2000+ invested in a mattress that we bought in good faith from a company that does not honor its warranty.