I imagine Kabir Siddiq rolling his eyes on the other side of the call. “Honestly, I am telling you, this can’t happen,” the entrepreneur behind Sleepy Cat, India’s “first-mattress-in-a-box” company, implores over the phone from his Kolkata office.
“In America, they use 12-inch-, 14-inch-thick mattresses with 4-6 inches of soft foam or memory foam. There may be a fear that an infant can sink or get suffocated between two heavy people as those mattresses are very soft. But I am telling you, it just can’t happen with our mattresses.”
Twenty-first-century urban lifestyles have spawned many nightmares. Welcome to the most terrifying of them all. Your infant sinking — and slowly choking — in your soft and snuggly mattress. Wait — a killer mattress? What kind of dopey practical joke is this? Hold my pillow and let me tell you a story.
How a NASA Project Landed on Your Bed
Most Indians will buy any mattress as long as it looks thick, says Karthik Srinivasan, a brand and communications expert based in Bengaluru.
I fell into the same category till my body cried out against our brick-like mattress earlier this year. After a long and confusing search for a replacement, I chanced upon a pristine white “orthopaedic” mattress at furniture retailer Urban Ladder’s store in Noida. It made me groan with pleasure. I was told that beneath the mattress’s hospital-like brand name — “Theramedic” — lay a magical invention: memory foam.
This type of foam was born out of a 1970s NASA project to improve seat cushioning and crash protection for airline pilots and passengers. The material moulds itself under your body heat and pressure and “remembers” your posture — hence memory foam.
In the past five years, the memory-foam bedding market has exploded in the United States. The country’s online mattress market is said to be valued at nearly $30 billion. Casper, an online mattress seller launched in 2014, has raised $340 million in funding and is valued at over $1 billion.
Like in the US, in India too, a rash of online mattress startups has sprung up. This segment is projected to be worth Rs 300 crore by next year. And all across, memory foam is touted as the cool new thing. Body pain appears to be driving up the demand for memory foam.
According to pharma major GSK’s 2017 Global Pain Index, after Poland, India reported the highest average number of sick days due to body pain. I am clearly not the only one waking up sore and looking for a better mattress.
“Lifestyle coupled with increased awareness that mattress and health go hand-in-hand is aiding the growth of the market,” says Ashutosh Vaidya, chief marketing officer at Kurl-On, one of India’s largest mattress sellers.
He estimates the Indian mattress industry to reach Rs 14,000 crore by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 9%.
These are exciting times for mattress buyers like me. Siddiq, a former investment banker who founded Sleepy Cat in 2017 after a stint in his family's traditional mattress business, says mattress shopping in India used to be a "nightmare".
"There's joy in buying a TV or a sofa but buying a mattress is seen as a chore. We wanted to make this industry desirable, fun and better," he says. Indeed, the musty old industry now has a sexy new name: "sleep solutions".
But what's all this talk about 'killer' mattresses? While Googling memory foam, I find Dr Kathy Gromer of Minnesota Sleep Institute. Speaking to WebMD.com, Gromer drops this bombshell: "Soft bedding traps [carbon dioxide] and increases the risk of sudden infant death syndrome". Bonkers!
There is also this from Amerisleep, a company in the very business of selling memory foam mattresses: "The same body-contouring properties that have made memory foam products famous worldwide... can pose a danger to infants¡K. primarily because kids of this age may not be able to turn themselves over at night which can become dangerous on a soft or contouring material."
Kurl-on's Vaidya cautions me as well, though not in such dire words. "When placed flat on his belly, a baby instinctively uses his arms to raise his head and shoulders off the floor," he says. "This move helps him strengthen the muscles he needs to flip. The sinking effect of the memory foam may act as obstacle in the initial phase of muscle gain and roll-over learning."
Staring guiltily at my 15-month-old, I email Urban Ladder. Please tell me all this is not true.
"We do not recommend the Memory Foam Mattress for infants," a customer-care agent replies. "Chemical wise it is definitely safe for babies. However, when it comes to the overall safety, the memory foam mattress may cause risk for suffocation for infants... (sic)." By now, I am gobsmacked. is there no outrage about this? Why aren't murderous a thing? I turn to Twitter with these questions. I must know why India's fancy new mattress startups --Wakefit, Sleepy Cat, Sunday Mattresses, Wink & Nod --are hiding this potentially deadly secret.
As my rant on Twitter gathers steam (159 retweets at last count), the calls start to pour in. India's mattress entrepreneurs want to tell me I have got this all wrong. The real Pandora's Box lies elsewhere, and it hides much dirtier truths.
Calcium Carbonate & Other Secrets
First to call is IIT-Roorkee graduate Ankit the founder of Wakefit. Garg understands foam, having worked with the stuff at the German multinational Bayer Material Sciences.
He decided to start Wakefit in 2016 after a retailer demanded a hefty sum for a knew how much the raw material cost, I shocked," Garg says. "The manufacturer doesn't make too much margin in this industry. The distributor and retailer do.
But the retailer brings no value addition. He has no training. He can't tell the customer what is good or bad is for his body type. And the customer has no idea what he is buying. It was clear to me that the industry was ripe for disruption."
Wakefit's sales have jumped from under Rs 2 crore in the first year (FY16) to Rs 27.6 crore in FY18, with a profit of Rs 2.23 crore. The startup is backed by Sequoia Capital.
"Walk into a showroom of any traditional mattress company and you will see blue maroon and white," Garg says. "And tonnes of permutations and combinations of foam, spring, latex, coir, bonded foam and expanded polyethylene (EPE) foam.
Every big brand out there has thousands of SKUs (stock keeping units).
Either they do not know how to make the perfect mattress or they are good at deceiving the customer."