johmas

I completely agree. I'll share your feedback with the team. Thank you.

We did pass it around the team to make sure it sound right. That generator must be pretty good.

Thank you. We really appreciate the support.

I apologize I wasn't more clear. I don't mean to come across as judgemental of Ikea. I haven't personally slept on one before other than just testing them out in the show room, but we do have quite a few customers who have replaced their Ikea bed with ours who have shared their feedback.

That's a really great point. I'll be sure to share this with the team today.

It really is for sure. We've had to get a special machine to package the mattress in a smaller box but we're still paying for what's called Dimensional weight. It's large enough that we aren't being billed for the weight but rather the size.

Luckily we've managed so far though and have been able to streamline some of the process. I imagine it will become easier as we grow.

Not that I can say for sure but we read HN and it may have had an influence on us if we read it.

I haven't slept on it personally but generally customers really like our comfort and feel.

* We also work really hard to provide good customer service and policies.

* Easy returns, helping you find a place to recycle your old beds a warranty that doesn't pro-rate and require you to jump through hoops to qualify for.

* All of our materials are made here in the states.

* We're a small team, I think those guys are pretty huge. They supply to Costco and other stores.

Either way, it's mostly about what the perfect fit is for you. Our bed won't be the best fit for everyone and we honestly would rather help customers find what they are looking for.

I can elaborate more and answer more questions offline if you'd like. My direct line is jt at tuftandneedle

We've heard customers like West Elm frames: http://www.westelm.com/shop/furniture/headboards-bed-frames/...

Our current frame is just a prototype but is something we'd like to make in the future.

Thank you for the feedback on the name. We came up with it while we were tufting our first few prototypes. We were using these huge needles called tufting needles.

I agree with you on the renderings. We've gone through 3 photographers and have spent so much money on it and the results just weren't that great. So we had to be a little resourceful and use 3D renderings. This gave us the flexibility to capture what the product looked like and to iterate on the environment and lighting quickly. We'll add more photos for sure as we're able.

The primary difference is that our warranty doesn't pro-rate. When you see a 10-25 year warranty, those aren't true warranties in our opinion. They depreciate the credit you'll get each year and have very strict requirements (no marks on the bed, sagging must be more than 1" deep, etc). So we offer 5 years for any kind of defect and just do an exchange. We expect it to last longer than that but 5 years is the point we feel most comfortable at currently, being a new company.

Well we started with a landing page with a simple form. We thought this would be even simpler than using a Shopify. Once we saw some traction I built the v1 shopping cart in about a day. One of the challenges we had was the software interfacing with our suppliers. We weren't sure if a 3rd party service would do that for us so we just built it quickly ourselves.

Daehee and I are both developers.

Our foam is a polyurethane foam like most other foam and memory foam mattresses. We use 3 different mixtures of foam in our bed, all of which have been offgas tested and meets the strict standards of the CertiPUR certification.

We definitely wouldn't sell something that we wouldn't want to sleep on ourselves but I can understand your concern with sleeping on something that isn't 100% natural.

If you're concerned about sleeping on foam then you might want to take a look at a more alternative option. Look for 95% natural latex foam (there is no such thing as 100% because they use glues) or for all organic cotton/wool tufted cores.

That's a really good point. We should do a better job at communicating that.

For clarification, we only sell a mattress at the moment. It is designed to be comfortable placed directly on the floor as it is on a bed frame.

Thank you.

Thank you!

That's great. If you have any other questions feel free to shoot them to me direct jt at tuftandneedle

Maybe we'll do a more in depth blog post about that. We are self funded entirely.

Thank you for the kind words.

Thank you

No previous experience. It was sort of random how we came to mattresses. It came out of a discussion we were having on a lunch break in downtown Palo Alto. I was raging about a bed I had just bought for $3,000+ and wasn't satisfied with the comfort.

It started from there.

We just released the king size and want to collect some feedback on it before posting to Amazon.

Amazon is really limiting when it comes to communication with our customers. This is a major pain point for us for that channel.

Thank you for the feedback

That's a great question. We have used 3 different photographers since we first launched and haven't been able to get the quality we wanted. So to cut on our costs, and it was really expensive using photographers + studio + models, we moved to renderings. This allowed us to depict the product as it looks but move the camera around and get the right lighting.

We really appreciate it. Thank you

We recommend a platform bed frame without a boxspring for the best feel.

The frame that we have in our photos is of our design but we're not really able to move into hard goods yet. Maybe once we grow a bit more.

West Elm has some nice simple designs that we like.

You're definitely right about that. We estimate that 90%+ of our potential customers wouldn't buy our bed unless they were able to touch it and lay down on it.

We setup some really good policies to make it super easy to return without much risk. We'll have it picked up by a 3rd party before having you ship it back to us as an example.

We see ourselves moving offline in the future for sure but to bootstrap, it wasn't really feasible to do anything other than launch online.

Well our current mattress is more in line with a traditional mattress. We designed it to be compatible with the floor in addition to a frame, this is how we sort of broke into the market. With a niche angle.

Comparing to Ikea, our prices are only comparable because we cut our margins almost all the way down but the quality of material is very different. In other words, our bed won't sag after just 12 months.

Thank you for the kind words.

Daehee and I are both bay area software guys. Breaking into a new industry that we had zero domain knowledge definitely wasn't easy. It took us quite a while to break in. Most suppliers wouldn't return our phone calls and the ones who did just laughed us out of the room. We had to just keep searching until we found the right people who believed in us.