Should I Buy A Bed-In-A-Box Mattress?

Have you been bombarded by bed-in-a-box mattress advertisements lately? You know, those showing excited customers opening tiny tubed boxes and watching their mattress expand to full size? The market has been flooded with tonnes of bed-in-a-box mattress brands.

Such retailers entered the market starting 2015 and are now making their presence felt with the aggressive and innovative online advertisements.

What do bed-in-a-box retailers offer?

Attractive prices

Competition is very aggressive in this market segment where the barriers to entry are low. More often than not, there is little product differentiation aside from the brand of the mattress. This is because, Chinese manufacturers have made it super easy for retailers to conduct drop shipping or create brands by mass producing white-label products.

For this reason, the cost structure of bed-in-the-box retailers are lower as most do not have physical stores or their own delivery team. The focus of such retailers is primarily to sell as many as possible.

Quick delivery time

Some retailers even promise a 2 hours delivery window. Impressive!

Small footprint
Because the foam mattress is compressed by a specialised machine, the delivery is made ultra-convenient and a user can tuck away and store his mattress in the storeroom to ‘deploy’ the mattress when he wants it to.

What bed-in-a-box retailers DO NOT offer
Showroom

One thing that all retailers tout is comfort. However, how do you truly know what comfort means? A showroom is helpful to ensure that customers make an informed decision. Go to a showroom and lie on their mattress for 20 minutes, heck, maybe an hour! We’re sure any decent showroom will allow you to!

Selection

Aside from 1 standard firmness, most bed-in-a-box retailers do not have a selection of mattresses. Customers love choice and need to compare between mattresses especially when a third of your time is spent on a mattress, there every reason to fuss over getting the right comfort. Unlike roll-up mattress, high quality mattress that comes with different layers of materials can’t be squashed and tucked into a compact box. The layers of goodness require edge support to be held together, keeping the mattress stable and in shape.

Closing thoughts
We think that bed-in-the-box mattresses are here to stay and offer more choices to the price-sensitive market segment. If true, their quick 2 hour delivery promise is certainly admirable.

Bed-in-the-box retailers have also spruced the traditional view of mattress retailers as boring by framing a mattress purchase as a fun and enjoyable process. Although one should not underestimate the weight of mattresses…. No surprises - they are very heavy.

Improved technologies that allow pocket springs to be compressed deserve further understanding and study. From a price perspective, these retailers offer value to some consumers. Certainly, an astute enterprise will be quick to adopt such innovative technologies as soon as it is proven stable and economically viable.

However, because a mattress is a personal purchase, testing a mattress is still extremely important before parting with your hard-earned money. Cellini’s Nightingale premium mattress has been manufacturing our mattresses in-house for over two decade. And no, Cellini does not believe in short-changing our customers with a rolled up mattress as the quality of our materials and construction simply cannot be compromised.

Unless your visiting relatives from overseas are coming tonight and you need a low cost mattress immediately, we think it might be best to do your homework before buying a mattress.

Oh, and don’t forget to buy a bedframe beforehand :)