The problem is that many people like to lie on a mattress before they buy it. Sure, that's a little silly since lying on it for a minute or so is unlikely to capture the experience of tossing and turning on it for a night, but it's clear that it's a competitive advantage to let the consumer compare a few models in a physically direct way.
Warby Parker can get away with the similar consumer requirement for glasses because glasses are small, light and easy to ship. They can send you half a dozen samples and let you pick the one you want. Not so easy with mattresses!
The car market has this problem as well (in addition to others, like the protectionist rackets that the dealerships have set up).
> The problem is that many people like to lie on a mattress before they buy it.
One can get all of the benefit of this by selling a single mattress, but also sending 3 or 4 foam mattress toppers to choose from. Correctly designed packaging would let the customer re-roll the topper, then use a vacuum pump to collapse the rolled topper back into a compact form for return mailing. (The pumps would be cheap and disposable, so wouldn't be returned.)
Using a system like this, one could become the Zappos of mattresses. There would still be a restocking and return fee for the mattress, but one could let the customers exchange and try toppers to their heart's content, so long as they took good care of the merchandise.
With a memory foam mattress, they tend to be vacuum packed in a plastic sleeve and box that is nigh-impossible to ever fit it back in again. I suppose if you had a specialized team that could come to your home, repackage it, and take it away, it might work, but that doesn't sound like it would scale very well outside of a large city.
My wife and I almost got a Sleep Innovations mattress, but in the end we felt that we couldn't buy a mattress that we hadn't had a chance to try out. We both like a very firm mattress, which can be difficult to find.
While it's true that lying on a mattress for a few minutes won't tell you whether it's the best one or not, it sure did help us rule out many mattresses. We ended up getting an Ikea mattress, which turned out to be quite nice.
Ikea also seems to be the only place in the UK that sells decent slatted frames to put under your mattress. I guess British people aren't familiar with the concept.
Ah yes, we previously had a box spring but opted for the slatted frame. I like it a lot, and I like having the bed lower to the ground (although the best my back ever was when I slept on tatami for a semester in Japan)
Warby Parker can get away with the similar consumer requirement for glasses because glasses are small, light and easy to ship. They can send you half a dozen samples and let you pick the one you want. Not so easy with mattresses!
The car market has this problem as well (in addition to others, like the protectionist rackets that the dealerships have set up).