Being in the retail side of the bedding business for almost fifteen years exposes you to some pretty amazing things. I started out in the futon business, at a time when futons had become more mainstream, and when Americans began to embrace the futon sofabed as comfortable, stylish, affordable, and even nostalgic..many folks who thought of their futon as something you threw into the dumpster behind your dorm after college, remembered it as being their sanctuary, a place where you could sleep for fourteen hours after being awake for four days. You could eat on it, hang out with friends on it, and you threw it into the back of your car and travelled with it, your futon, your cinderblock bookshelves, and your Hefty bags filled with all of your earthly possessions. I quickly developed two very busy stores, and then ultimately a web based store, to sell the softgoods and accessories that went along with the futon sofabeds we sold.
As time went on, customers who had become friends began to ask about other bedding alternatives, and since I was keenly interested in finding out what the next bed dujour might be, and, worrying that futons would sort of drift into history, I paid attention. Soon we were outfitting our stores with Tempur-Pedic beds, and when we expanded to New Orleans, we quickly grew to become one of the largest distributors of Tempur-Pedic memory foam beds in the nation. Out of 6,500 dealers, we were number 35, and for two solid years our phones rang off the hook, trucks were rolling, with everyone wanting to take a ride on this “space-age” super high tech bed that molds around your body. Problem was, we had a fairly high rate of return, and people often complained about off-gassing “chemical” odors, since the beds are manufactured using petroleum derived, synthetic urethane foam. Other complaints included the mattresses becoming very hot while sleeping on them, the foam becoming rock hard during cold times of the year (memory foam is often temperature sensitive and responds by either getting extremely firm, or so soft it feels like you’re swimming in it).
Customers who returned their memory foam mattresses felt strongly connected to us because of our closely knit customer service mindset, and our desire to develop relationships with our customers, so they’d often ask, still enthusiastically, ”What else do you have?”… Around this time, we in fact had been seeing Natural Latex popping up more and more at industry shows, and several reps and manufacturers had told us that Europeans were already buying Natural Latex as mainstream bedding and had been for years, so we started researching in earnest.
We felt the strong sense that our customers, who were becoming more and more green, some of them true treehuggers, wanted to move away from petroleum based bedding materials, and with more and more global emphasis on the shift away from making every single household item from oil, we also felt very strongly about this. But, we were skeptical that a mattress manufactured strictly from a botanical product could really be comfortable.
So astonished were we at the sheer comfort level of Natural Latex when we received our first custom designed prototype Latex bed, that we called our production facility to ask them how fast we could get it into a working model, and onto our website, which had by now shifted away from futons to our current concept, Habitat Furnishings, which focuses primarily on our Natural Latex mattress line, as we lost interest in or simply phased out our futon products. Once we knew we wanted to offer a Natural Latex mattress line, we began researching the current marketplace to see what existing retailers and manufacturers were already doing. What we found was pretty much what we expected.
First off, it was almost impossible to find an all natural latex bed that wasn’t either made of synthetic, petroleum based urethane foam, a blend of some natural latex and urethane foam (which some retailers still claimed was “all natural”), or a complex, laminated and layered mattress so confusing that you needed a technical manual for a starship just to figure out what was really in it. Also, every time something was laminated and glued together, we knew that a cumulative effect of exposure to formaldehyde based VOC glues was being created. Different densities, varying degrees of firmness and softness, also added to the myriad of confusion created when a customer tried to find a latex mattress. Our solution: find a source of 100% all Natural Latex, and we did, our natural material is 100% Sri Lankan white latex rubber (you can read more about our source by visiting Latex Green, the cooperative company where our latex cores, or layers, are sourced. We also wanted to offer only two very simplistically designed models, eliminate all the “myticism” and psychobabblish nonsense from the selection process. and make choosing a Natural Latex mattress simple, and even “fun”.
Our site today features two unique models, our 6″ Natural Latex bed which features one continuous “block” of Sri Lankan white latex rubber made using the Dunlop method, and our 8″ Natural Latex bed, which offers a wonderfully cushy built-in pillowtop section, a 2″ slightly softer layer laminated using water based adhesive, to our slightly firmer 6″ base layer. Both models are encased in an organic cotton cover, and contain NO synthetic materials. Totally green, but astonishingly comfortable. You can see both of our models on our Habitat Furnishings Latex page.