Good sleep is something that’s probably pretty important to most of us.
In pursuit of that, we do resort to buying expensive mattresses, which often come with all sorts of fancy-name technology woven in, and claim to give you the best sleep of your life. But how do you tell what’s right and what’s just jargon?
Joey and Winson, two 23-year old university graduates both went through the struggle of purchasing the “right” mattress.
“Mattress shopping sucks,” Winson and Joey said matter-of-factly. “The salesmen are pushy, the price is very high and there are too many confusing options.”
With their previous experiences in e-commerce, they took one look at the mattress industry and knew they had to do something about it.
They recruited a foam expert with 30 years of experience in engineering mattress foams, and founded Joey Mattress,
Joey leads the brand and marketing direction while Winson manages the business development and operations of Joey Mattress.
Flipping The Mattress
Joey Mattress’ goal? To be able to offer higher-quality mattresses at affordable prices along with an incredible customer experience.
As is common with quite a few online mattress sellers, Joey Mattress offers a 99-day free trial to let you test it at home to see if it’s right for you.
Once you’ve decided that you like it, delivery is free upon purchase and if you change your mind again, a full refund is available for returns.
At Joey Mattress, Joey and Winson want to make mattress shopping easy and enjoyable.
They work according to a straightforward ideation process: Identify problems, serve solutions.
After creating a list of problems in the mattress industry, they produced a list of solutions to them.
During that process, they realised that if they wanted to make high-quality mattresses while keeping the prices low, they needed a mattress manufacturer.
It would also differentiate them from other companies who simply resold mattresses online.
“We came up with our business proposal and pitched it to all the mattress manufacturers we could lay our hands on.”
“One manufacturer bought our idea, and from there, the door that kept us out of the industry was opened,” they said.
Once they had gotten a manufacturer, they needed a design.
“We researched and surveyed all the mattresses out there, we go to homes to talk to people, go to stores with them and consulted sleep experts to really get below the surface and understand what people really need in a mattress.”
“When we were developing the prototype, we ordered stacks of different materials from different suppliers.”
“We did hundreds of nights of sleep testing on different sample mattresses built by layering the foams but couldn’t get what we were looking for,” Winson and Joey admitted.
“So, we invented our own foam, the J-Foam engineered for better breathability, bounciness, pressure-point relief and ultra-durability.”
The Joey mattress is made entirely of the J-Foam with a two-layer construction: the top one for comfort and the bottom one for support.
It also claims to allow air to flow in and out of the mattress for a cooler sleep, while its Zero-Motion Transfer technology absorbs and isolates movement for the comfort of those who share beds.
The J-Foam eliminated the need for coil springs, pocketed springs, memory foam and latex, which the Joey Mattress team deemed as unable to provide proper comfort and support.
A Single-sized mattress costs RM1,250, a Queen RM1,895, and a King costs RM2,395.
Under The Bed
Customers weren’t the only people Joey Mattress needed to prove itself to; fellow players within the industry were usually from an older generation with prejudiced perceptions of younger people like Joey and Winson.
To challenge these perceptions, the team at Joey Mattress had to ensure that they were assertive, their presentations were well-prepared, and their ideas communicated in a concise way.
According to Joey Mattress, an average Malaysian’s knowledge of mattresses and the industry is rife with misconceptions.
For example, we like to believe that quality mattresses are expensive to make in order to justify the price we pay for them.
“The truth is that it doesn’t cost that much to make a great mattress,” Winson and Joey revealed.
“What really makes any mattress expensive is the layers of middlemen markups that go into it.”
“We have our own foam and mattress factory and we sell directly to our customers with no middleman involved.”
It’s how Joey Mattress manages to keep their quality high and their prices low while giving themselves a huge competitive edge.
What also doesn’t make a good mattress is its thickness. Many mattress companies play into this misconception by continuously producing thicker mattresses and then charging ever-increasing prices with little concern as to whether or not they actually provide better sleep.
The Joey Mattress team maintain that plenty of mattress features for “better sleep” are merely gimmicks and lies that we still end up falling for.
“They’re probably there so that mattress companies can charge you ever-increasing prices rather than help you make an informed purchasing decision,” Winson and Joey said.
Nowhere Else Like Home
A lot of us tend to think that international brands trump local ones, but Joey reveals that almost all international mattress brands are licensed and made in Malaysia by local manufacturers.
There’s simply no reason for us to ignore local brands anymore, not when brands like Joey Mattress are constantly improving their craft.
Already in the research and development stages for the company are pillows and bed bases.
The team asserted that they’ll also be of high-quality with fair prices, and free from manufacturer, distributor and retailer markups.
Joey Mattress aims to become Malaysia’s favourite online mattress brand in the next six months and expand throughout Southeast Asia in the next five years while staying true to their values of: Higher Quality, Fair Price, and Customer Happiness.
“We believe that by aligning everything we do to our values and with creative advertising, we’ll be there in no time,” Winson and Joey stated.
- Find out more about Joey Mattress here.