In the 18 years I’ve been in the mattress business, I’ve seen a lot. One of the biggest eye openers is the marketing gimmicks of large mattress manufacturers. When I just got started, I sold Restonic mattresses because they had a line of memory foam which I thought at the time was good quality memory foam for a really low price compared to Tempur Pedic and some others.
My sales rep was a man named Mark and I really thought generally well of him as a person, seemingly very honest. But even after I stopped selling Restonic mattresses as well as all other big brand-name brands, I still kept in touch with Mark from time to time. One of the things I liked to do was bounce off ideas and gather information from him. One time I called him just to ask how business was, since at the time I was experiencing a lull in sales. I always wanted to know if the whole retail market was down or if it was just me that was down in sales. His response to my question was revealing from a marketing standpoint. He said, “Business is good, we have a new line of mattresses out that are doing really well for us. It is a line of gel foam that sells really well.” So upon hearing this, I asked, “Come on, Mark, what is the real story behind the new gel infused memory foam?” He said, “It’s just something to talk about.”
So, in other words, they didn’t develop gel infused memory foam to make the mattresses cooler, they put gel in the memory foam to give some semblance of an effort to make memory foam cooler, but it was really designed to have something new to talk about marketing wise and thus boost sales.
This is the standard in the mattress industry. The “latest and greatest technology in sleep!” But there is really nothing new in the realm of sleep. Most of the buzz about “new technology” is just noise. These large companies through their marketing departments, make inferior products but are masters of spinning the “new technology” as superior products. Thus, gel infused memory foam is a marketing gimmick and is proof serious shoppers of a quality new mattress need to stay away from large mattress companies because they are the most dishonest.