A night on an air mattress is something you get through. If you’ve had anything positive to say about the experience, there was undoubtedly a caveat: “I slept pretty well given … I was on an air mattress.” Even air-mattress companies describe their products with limitations. Take the SoundAsleep air mattress. The company, the website notes, was “founded under the premise of providing you the best night sleep possible on an air mattress.”
About seven years ago — before getting married and having a child — I moved away from my home in New York City to try my hand at tech writing. It was the height of gigification and disruption, and I was immersed in that world. Start-ups were improving what I ate, how I got around, even how I removed the lint from my sweater. But when I decided to buy an air mattress in preparation for my mother’s first trip out west to visit me, I found myself unboxing a noisy, bulky dinosaur of a home gadget. In fact, the air mattress I purchased proved so uncomfortable that my mom got up in the middle of the night to squeeze into my full-size bed with me. A few weeks later, when my sister visited, the air mattress lay deflated and abandoned again.
In the course of reporting this story, I chatted about air mattresses with just about everyone I encountered and failed to find a single truly satisfied customer. Identifying experts with “air mattress” authority was not a particularly straightforward task either. As far as I can tell, no one has published a study on air mattresses. (For a second, I thought I had found a valid research paper but it turned out to be focused on an entirely different product — air mattresses placed atop hospital beds to prevent bed sores.) And right off the bat, a business professor I reached out to emailed to say he did not have time for an interview but that he wanted me to know my pursuit reminded him of the AeroToilet SNL sketch. (The “product” can be blown up and used when you have too many guests and not enough bathrooms. All goes well until it really, really doesn’t.)
But I was undeterred and eventually, I did find answers — or at least, theories.
Theory No. 1: Almost no one (other than me?) is interested in innovating air mattresses.
After watching the SNL sketch, I decided to canvas the MBA community a bit more widely and reached out to Columbia Business School. I told the communications officer that I wanted to speak to people who understood consumer packaged goods and might know why air mattresses haven’t been absorbed by a sleek start-up. Columbia put me in touch with Olivier Toubia, who teaches the program’s Foundations of Innovation class. He said that the air-mattress situation reminded him of the tennis balls people affix to the bottoms of their walkers to help them glide — an inelegant solution that no one seems particularly motivated to improve upon.
“There are areas like this where people are happy with what’s already available, and no one really has the incentive to innovate,” he said. In his line of business, these segments are called “innovation deserts.” Innovation usually arises from two categories — function or emotion — and air mattresses fall into the former category, he said. But unlike, say, a coffee table or a couch, consumers don’t think of an air mattress as a status symbol or a vehicle for self-expression. If a start-up wanted to innovate in the space, it would be difficult to get funding. Imagine how that pitch goes. What’s the market like? Well, consumers buy one every few years, hide them in their closets, and the buyer is rarely the end user.
I also reached out to Manini Madia, who teaches at NYU Stern and studies consumer behavior. She connected the lack of innovation to the point of purchase. “Consumers may not perceive any real differentiators in an air mattress,” she says, adding that it’s nearly impossible for a casual browser to distinguish between brands. “People might just go to the cheapest one or the most portable one. Ultimately, the juice might not be worth the squeeze to invest in the R&D to improve the air-mattress product category.” In an ideal world, though, she said there would be constant upgrades to the materials, battery, size, comfort, sustainability, and convenience of the product. (You know, just a few things.)
Theory No. 2: There is only so much you can do with air.
Even if the air mattress was an in-home status symbol, it turns out that innovating it would still come up against a significant challenge: “Air itself has this comic rebelliousness,” says materials scientist Mark Miodownik. Miodownik is a professor at University College London and his latest book, It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World, includes a chapter on pneumatics — the use of pressurized air in mechanical systems.
Over the phone — and after telling me about an ill-fated camping trip he spent sleeping on an air mattress — he explained that an air mattress is filled with frantically bouncing molecules that constantly rearrange themselves to counterbalance the sleeper’s weight in a feedback loop. “As soon as you change even a little bit, you’ve increased the pressure somewhere, and you’ve decreased it somewhere else. Then the mattress has to equalize. It has to change, and that change affects you. And, of course, you may not feel comfortable in that new equilibrium. So, then you change back, then it changes, then you change back, and in the end, you feel like it’s dominating,” he told me. He added that while the air mattress is definitely not “alive,” it has a kind of mischievous quality to it. “The pushback feels quite hard compared to a foam mattress because foam depresses in different places. An air mattress tends to try to push you out of the bed if you’re not in the middle of it,” he said.
Temperature can also impact the air pressure, and the mattress materials — PVC, plastic, rubber — can stretch over time, he told me. Air mattresses can also crack and get punctured, though air leakage typically stems from a broken valve. “In a way, the valve itself is the key piece of technology that is really impressive from a science perspective. Everything else — it’s like a bag,” he says.
Theory No. 3: Private equity came for air mattresses.
Miodownik’s reverence for the valve intrigued me, because a patent battle surrounding it had emerged as one of my front-running theories for why air mattress improvements have been so slow to take shape. In the early 1990s, Aerobed patented an internal battery-powered pump and quick-release valve that enabled the rapid inflation and deflation air mattresses have today. And over the next ten or so years, the company’s focus largely seems to have centered on defending that patent — potentially stymying air-mattress transformation. In 2006, Aerobed finally won a patent-infringement lawsuit against Walmart and Intex Recreation Corp., another air-mattress manufacturer. (Walmart had been selling both brands concurrently and pricing Intex’s more competitively.) But Aerobed’s patent expired a few years later, and at some point since then, Aerobed itself expired as well. When I got in touch with its last owner, Coleman (which was in turn acquired by a company called Newell), the PR rep couldn’t tell me what had become of Aerobed. All that’s left is a website with dead links. Yet somehow the company is still synonymous with air mattresses, like Kleenex is with a tissue.
I then set out to decipher who currently owns all the other major air-mattress companies and who was actually making the mattresses. Quite a few companies have passed between different owners and private equity groups. Air-mattress-maker Enerplex, which, according to its website, started out as a renewable energy company, was purchased by home-goods maker Mayfair. Then Thrasio — an Amazon aggregator — acquired the company. Thrasio emerged from bankruptcy just this past June. I also reached out to the most popular (and well reviewed) air-mattress brands, including Enerplex, Soundasleep, KingKoil, and Englander. These companies declined my request for an interview or didn’t respond at all.
However, Intex, of that Aerobed lawsuit, was willing to talk. The company started out as a toy maker in the 1970s and later acquired an inflatable toy manufacturer, pushing the company into the air-mattress market. Today, Intex says it’s the largest air-mattress-maker in the world, with over 50 percent of the market and the ability to produce about 100,000 mattresses a day. That said, Intex also makes a lot of other products, and during the pandemic, the company moved away from air mattresses and focused on its pool business. This opened up space in the air-mattress market, “We had a proliferation of no name brands that just flooded the market. A ton of manufacturers got into the space that had no experience. So as a result, the consumer has to kind of tread through,” says Ryan Slate, director of sales marketing at Intex. He wasn’t surprised that these other air-mattress-makers weren’t responding to my requests for interviews.
I asked Slate how Intex has innovated the air mattress since it lost that patent suit 18 years ago. He told me that Intex redesigned the valve “during the pendency of the litigation,” adding that their mattress’s built-in pump has “completely changed” in terms of design, convenience, and efficiency. These days, he says, Intex holds its own patents and has added new features to the mattress itself, the most significant of which is “Dura Beam Technology.” Slate describes this as “a whole bunch of internal tensioning strands of polyester fiber that hold the air mattress’s shape better,” allowing it to contour to your body without expanding or ballooning. In other words, he tells me that Intex has disrupted the air mattress. In the last 25 years, he says, it has gone from “very, very basic, like a pool float” to what he describes as a “bedroom-in-a-box solution.”
Theory No. 4: Maybe we don’t want our in-laws to be that comfortable.
Hearing Slate’s passion over the phone, I began to wonder if my experience with their pre-pandemic competitor was now irrelevant. I picked up an Intex mattress at my local Walmart for $50. I set it up in my living room, took my shoes off, and lay down. Immediately, I was pleasantly surprised by how relatively balanced it felt. Although the bed did shift and respond to my movements, it didn’t do so dramatically. It felt sturdy, if a little too hard. But there was one problem: With my every movement, the mattress squeaked.
Marten Carlson, the lead reviewer at Mattress Clarity, says noise is an issue in most air mattresses he tests. Adding flocking on top or weaving in fibers has helped with the squeaking — but only to a point. “These companies do their best, I feel, to say “Okay, everyone knows the annoying things about air mattresses. So they’re adding new features to be like, “Oh, we’re unlike the normal air mattresses,” he said. “But I don’t think that innovation has ever been that exciting.” The Strategist’s own sleep writer, Amelia Jerden, who tested air mattresses for this website, said the process opened her eyes to the fact that air mattresses have barely changed in the past few years. “Traditional mattress brands are continually rolling out new tech. It’s odd that the same thing hasn’t ever happened with air mattresses,” she says. Carlson has had the same experience with traditional mattresses, which are the bread and butter of his testing.
When I asked Carlson why he’s never found a truly stellar air mattress, he told me that he doesn’t think shoppers are disappointed in their air mattresses — they know what they’re going to get, he assured me. “They want it to be durable, not to leak, and not to have their father-in-law come down and say, ‘Hey, it popped last night, and I slept on the floor,’” he says. “They’re kind of built to be disposable. And for you to forget about.”
Perhaps that’s why we often don’t treat our air mattresses very well. After all, where is your air mattress right now? In a damp garage? Thrown in a heap in your closet? Both of these are ideal scenarios for damage.
Toubia had a slightly different theory for this neglect. You could make a more comfortable air mattress, he told me, “But at the same time, you don’t want your guests to be too comfortable.”
Madia agreed. “You don’t want to have too nice of a guest bedroom because then your guests won’t leave, you know, like the Kato Kaelins of the world.” She paused to think, then went on: “If Kaelin had been on an air mattress, maybe he wouldn’t have been such a permanent house guest.”
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