Finding the perfect mattress

If you have ever bought a mattress you will know what an arduous process it can be. The choices are endless, with a mind boggling array of different structures and materials from latex to memory foam, pocket sprung to open coil, and cotton to damask. 
 
Add the plethora of new ‘mattress in a box’ companies, including Simba, Eve, Casper, Leesa, Bruno, Otty, Hyde & Sleep, and many more, claiming to have the world’s most comfortable all-in-one hybrid mattress for all sleeping styles and body types, then the picture becomes even more complicated.
 
So how do you know if you are getting the most appropriate mattress for your specific needs, whilst getting value for money? Is it worth paying extra for exclusive brands such as Hypnos and Tempur, or are Simba/Eve/Leesa/Casper etc. just as good or even better? Will a mattress from Ikea, at an even lower price point, match the quality and comfort of the rest? 
 
The mattress industry appears to make it deliberately confusing for us, with manufacturers providing what appears to be identical (if not very similar) mattresses to different retailers, but naming them differently. This is not an uncommon practice - for example many TV manufacturers do this, where an identical TV is given a slightly different model number dependent on the retailer it is supplied to. In the case of mattresses, it could mean paying significantly more because comparison is difficult, particularly if there are only small differences - so you could end up paying an extra £200 for a difference that is negligible. 
 
The mixture of materials used, particular in hybrid mattresses, makes the task even more complicated. How do you compare a mattress constructed with latex, memory foam, and high density foam, to one constructed with Actigel, memory foam, and microcoils? As a result, we are left to trawl through thousands of reviews to try and identify if a mattress will suit our specific needs.
 
Reviews can be extremely helpful in informing our decision, however we are all unique. So what’s suitable for one person isn’t necessarily suitable for the rest of us. We are all different heights and weights, sleep in different positions, have different sleep environments, and suffer from different sleep issues such as muscle/joint pain, overheating and so on. 
 
Reviews are also typically based on someone’s comparing their sleep experience on their new mattress to their old one. You would expect a new mattress to be significantly more comfortable that one that is several years old (although this is not always the case). However whilst it could be their best night’s sleep ever, without sleeping on every single mattress out there, they won’t know if there are more comfortable mattresses available. 
 
With sleep being so important to our health and well-being, we want to find the very best for our budget, so how do we navigate this maze to find our perfect mattress? Well here at Sleep like a Sloth we’ve taken on the challenge and are in the process of developing our own comparison site at MattressChooser.co.uk with the aim of pulling together as much information as we can to enable you to easily compare the huge range of mattresses out there. This is very much a work in progress and we will be constantly improving the site as time passes. 
 
We are also looking to conduct our own research that we hope will enable users to make choices based on their own specific needs. If you would like to help we would love it if you could spare us a couple of minutes to fill out the following questionnaire.