These people hated their mattresses — so they built their own

Hanging art. Painting a room. Building a fire pit. These are commonly accepted DIY projects. But a fervent group of hobbyists wants to add one more to the list: building your own mattress.

Frustrated by high prices and dissatisfied with the comfort and life span of store-bought mattresses, these folks research and buy the individual layers that make up a mattress, subbing out various latexes, coils and other components until they have stacked the perfect pallet. Many have found one another online, forming niche communities on forums such as Reddit where they swap tips and crowdsource information.

Some, like Andrew Gerges, need a mattress that alleviates a particular ailment. The New Port Richey, Florida, resident has dealt with lower-back issues since a motorcycle accident, and he had been waking up in pain after years on the same mattress. “I was trying to find a mattress that was firm yet still soft enough to side-sleep,” he says. “And that’s a very hard thing to do.”

While looking at reviews on Reddit, he saw a post about the DIY route. At first, he was surprised this was even an option, and he thought it might be too complicated. But seeing the price tag of the mattresses that fit his specifications sent him circling back to the idea.

The first step entails copious research into the options, of which there are many. Degrees of firmness. Coil count. Thick vs. thin. A bevy of different materials. There is no lack of information – aficionados are all too happy to share their builds in great detail online and offer advice to newcomers.

“The easiest thing is putting them together,” Gerges says. “The hardest thing is picking out what you want.” (Also tough: convincing his skeptical wife. “She was like, ‘What do you mean, build a mattress? Can’t we just buy one that’s already made?’ ”)

Once Gerges felt confident about his choice of materials, it was time to start shopping. He and his wife sleep on a king-size bed, but he ordered most layers in size twin XL so each person could have a customized side of the mattress, built to their preferred level of firmness. He ordered eight-inch coils, three-inch microcoils, layers of Dunlop latex and wool mattress pads, all of which get stacked on top of one another and shoved into a zippered encasement. (You can source such supplies from specialty vendors, or just peruse Amazon.) The actual process of building isn’t as involved as it sounds – it’s kind of like making a seven-layer dip.

“It takes 5, 10 minutes to do once you have everything,” Gerges says. He started experimenting with the order, feeling the minute differences when he would, say, put the micro coils on top or in the middle of the configuration. “You can really play around with it,” he says. “I like that aspect of it, I think, the most.”

He made some key adjustments as he went. At first, he wanted to use wool because he liked that it was a natural fiber, but when he got sick, he sweated through the wool layer, causing an indent. He replaced it with latex. When his wife was pregnant, she wanted a softer mattress, but after she gave birth, she preferred more firmness. No problem – all he had to do was sub out a layer. And once you zip up the encasement, it looks like a normal mattress, rather than some kind of harebrained garage experiment.

Ultimately, he estimates that it cost between $1,200 and $1,500, for a luxury mattress that could retail for 10 times that price. But the cost wasn’t his main motivation. “It wasn’t really to save money as much as it was to find the perfect bed,” he says. And in the end, his wife was convinced, too. “Once everything came in, my wife was like, ‘This is the best bed I’ve ever slept on,’” he says.

Jess Powell’s DIY mattress journey has many similarities. She faced excruciating back pain when she slept and mistrusted name-brand mattresses. She would watch videos on YouTube of mattress autopsies – where people take apart mattresses to show what’s inside – and felt as though big companies were overselling their components. (“I literally googled, ‘Mattress shopping is sucking my soul,’” she recalls.) When she discovered the prospect of making her own, she felt more excited than intimidated.

“I was that kid who took toys apart to see how they worked and then put them back together,” she says. “This is just what I really like to do.”

Powell, who lives outside Seattle, will happily discuss the pros and cons of using two-inch and one-inch latex layers versus one three-inch layer. In fact, she became so consumed by the project that her wife got sick of hearing about it and laid down the law: “She had to limit my mattress data dumps to one time a day,” says Powell. Luckily, she found a community on Reddit delighted to discuss the finer details – the difference between Dunlop latex and talalay latex, for instance, or whether you need a transition layer between your comfort and support layers.

Powell says her wife is now fully on board. “She’s super happy with all the work that I put into it now,” says Powell, who feels the difference every night and every morning. “The thing we lay on all the time to regenerate us, to be able to live, can be causing a lot of problems.”

Matan Wolfson, vice president of sales and business development at Texas Pocket Springs, says he fields calls from DIYers every day. The bulk of his company’s business is wholesale, but he says he started getting requests to sell the company’s patented Quadcoils to individuals early in 2023.

Although figuring out how to package and ship a single unit of coils – the amount needed for one mattress – was a challenge, he decided last summer to give it a try. At first, Texas Pocket Springs sold one or two units a week to individuals. Now, a year later and with zero marketing budget, the company sells about 50 per week, Wolfson says.

Dealing with the customers is a significant time commitment: “There’s a lot of hand-holding doing this,” he says. “You do have a lot of people that want to talk to you and have questions about the build. … There is no standard sort of way to do it.”

Still, there are some nuggets of commonly accepted wisdom. The first is to start with your support layer, which is commonly made of pocket coils or high-density foam. “That’s the most important part because that’s your foundation,” Wolfson says. As the name suggests, that layer provides the structure for the mattress.

Then, you can decide what type of “comfort layer” to add on top. This is the part of the mattress that relieves pressure; it’s what your body directly lies on. There are far more options for consumers here because a person could buy any kind of mattress topper. Oft-used materials include latex, natural fibers and memory foam.

The other mantra repeated in the DIY space is that it’s easier to make something softer with new layers, whereas it’s more difficult to make a mattress firmer. So, it’s better to err on the side of firmer rather than softer from the get-go.

There are also some necessary warnings: This process isn’t for everyone. A person needs to enjoy the iterative process. And, in terms of safety, commercial mattresses must have some kind of fire barrier. DIYers need to add their own.

Some of Wolfson’s customers are one-and-done – “you’re going to have someone who’s like hardcore into it while they’re doing their build … [and then] you never hear from them again” – but he’s starting to see repeat patrons working on mattresses for friends or family.

Wolfson says investing in this community makes sense because it builds up the Quadcoil reputation among the most passionate mattress maestros. Next up, he wants the company to start making other layers for mattress builds and is starting to prototype covers.

So where did this trend start? The man who takes credit for the DIY mattress idea is Ken Hightower, a longtime innovator in the industry who is CEO of retailer Arizona Premium Mattress. His experience selling water beds that incorporated a zippered cover influenced his thoughts about making a mattress’s innards accessible. He was also one of the first to sell mattresses over the internet.

As Hightower tells it, living in Phoenix means a lot of his customers are retirees, and he was sick of seeing elderly people come in with two-year-old mattresses that already had dips and other wear-and-tear. “This just kept happening over and over and over again. It was bothering me,” he says. “And I had the knowledge to show them how they could actually fix their mattress.”

In 2016, he began posting videos to YouTube that showed people how to open up their brand-name mattresses, keep their coils and replace their flagging top layers with the latex his company sells. (Experts don’t recommend taking apart really cheap mattresses, which could contain and release fiberglass. And you should definitely avoid opening one with a label that explicitly states the mattress contains glass fiber.)

The videos, Hightower says, “just started craziness.” Coils tend to last far longer than the top layers, so the intent was for people to salvage the part of the mattress that was still in working order and toss the layers that no longer served them. But sometimes, the coils were also kaput.

DIY mattresses are now a huge part of Hightower’s business, he says. “It’s definitely been gathering steam. And you know, when I think it’s peaked, it hasn’t peaked.”

There’s a transparency component for Hightower, too. He wants people to be able to see inside their mattresses so they know exactly what they are sleeping on.

“People were intimidated by mattresses. You know, ‘Tear them apart? How do I do that?’” he says. “We’re giving them power, education, knowledge.”