For many years, the mattress industry has done their best to convince shoppers that beds should feel a certain way. You need a mattress that feels like a cloud, a pile of feathers, unicorn bones and pixie dust—their marketing gimmicks are relentless. For too long consumers have believed that in order to get a great night’s sleep, they need to spend thousands of dollars on something that is as soft as cherub’s wings.

When we started Tuft & Needle, one of our goals was to change consumers’ perceptions about what makes a great mattress. Instead of talking about pillow tops and Wonder Clouds, we focused on building the best mattress possible. Instead of ads featuring fairytale characters, we focused on our customers and what they wanted in a bed. As a result, we’ve built a better product, for a fair price, and managed to disrupt an entire industry.

Today, one of the most frequent questions we receive is about how our mattress feels. If it’s not a dream cloud what is it? When customers ask about how our bed feels instead of using gimmicky language, we are as transparent as possible. Our mattress is considered to be medium firm, but we know that the feeling of comfort is subjective.

We designed our mattress to be universally comfortable by iterating our product, finding the ideal combination of comfort and support. It’s soft to the touch but provides all of the support you need to stay aligned throughout the night, the best of both worlds.

We are realistic in knowing that it won’t work for 100% of all people. However, we are very proud that it works for 95% of our customers! Only 5% of customers who buy with us return their mattress. Of that small percentage, half say it is too firm and half say it is too soft. While, this speaks to the comfort of our mattress, it also speaks to the subjectiveness of how a bed can feel!

This subjectivity is one of the big reasons why we offer our 100-Night Sleep Trial. Our sleep trial gives sleepers the opportunity to truly decide how the mattress feels for their body over an extended period of time. There is no gimmick and no silly language, just a straightforward experience. Looking for something firm, soft, or in-between? Every customer has the opportunity to try out the mattress to make sure it’s the best fit for them.

The mattress industry tries to convince consumers that they need to pay a lot of money for a name, but we’ve found what most people really need is a well-made, fairly-priced product that they can try out in the comfort of their own home.

No fancy names required.