After 25 Years As A Mattress Expert, I Can Help You Find The Perfect Mattress
a seasoned mattress expert. impartial recommendations. not owned by mattress companies.
Marc Anderson, the CEO and creator of The Mattress Buyer Guide, has been a mattress expert and industry veteran in the USA for over 25 years, and is a respected authority in the mattress business.
He founded Habitat Furnishings and along with business partner David Rosenberg and his company, Healthy Foundations, built one of the first juggernaut online retail mattress businesses beginning in 1998, selling natural latex mattresses.
Before that, Marc was one of Tempur-Pedic’s highest volume retail partners before developing his own brands. He was instrumental in developing programs to donate gently used mattresses and test sample mattresses to charitable organizations like Habitat For Humanity, Furniture Bank, Goodwill, and others.
A Mattress Expert With In The Trenches Experience
Unlike other digital marketing mattress review sites TheMattressBuyerGuide.Com is led by a mattress expert who has spend almost 30 years helping people find the best mattress their specific needs. Marc is a mattress expert who has designed mattress for hundreds of clients with disabilities, chronic illnesses, ADHD, addiction recovery struggles, and those needing end of life or palliative care .
He is a nationally recognized mattress expert and authority on bedding design, an upholstery components expert, and has invented, manufactured, and sold his brands of specialty mattresses online through his own companies such as Habitat Furnishings, FCO Homegoods, and more. Marc has personally tested and reviewed almost 1,000 mattresses over the years.
CREDENTIALS AND INDUSTRY BACKGROUND: THE MAKING OF A real mattress EXPERT
Here are Marc’s credentials as a mattress review authority:
- B.S., The University Of Maryland at College Park, Physiology And Animal Science
- Components expert and industry authority: Polyurethane foams, urethane foams in a variety of densities and ILD’s, innerspring and pocket coil assemblies fabricated in the USA as well as imported, textiles and fire barrier expert, natural materials expert, including latex rubber, soy based polyols.
- More than 25 years of mattress design experience: manufactured his own line of natural latex, memory foam, and pocketed coil hybrid mattresses for web sites he created or managed, like Habitat Furnishings, FCO Homegoods, and Healthy Foundations.
- Helped to create today’s “bed in a box” mattress industry from 1998-2019 while a manufacturer. Became full time mattress tester, content writer, and Senior Editor in 2020.
- Designed and manufactured custom mattresses for clients with medical conditions including scoliosis, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), Lyme Disease, terminal cancer, COVID, and other end of life conditions.
- The web’s foremost authority on memory foam and pressure and pain relieving polyurethane foam.
Note that our site may receive commissions for brands we recommend. These commissions pay for our test facility, cost of staff, content writing, and overhead. We don’t advertise and strive to provide easy to understand content.
From Retailer And Manufacturer, To Mattress Reviewer, Tester, And Industry Authority
Eventually, Marc transitioned from retail to product development and product reviews, growing The Mattress Buyer Guide into a valuable resource for consumers by making the mattress shopping experience easier. His approach of offering academic, technical, and transparent assessments of the most popular online mattress brands has earned him trust and recognition from hundreds of thousands of visitors to this site.
Marc has a simple mission. Scour through hundreds upon hundreds of online retailers and narrow your shopping list down to a handful of really great options. His motto: “we tested them so you don’t have to”, is the mantra of our review site. He developed a 10 point test that quickly evaluates the most important considerations you need to know when buying a mattress online.
Here’s a sample of Marc’s testing format, in this case for The Saatva Classic Innerspring Mattress:
The Saatva Classic Mattress: Review And Report By 25 Year Mattress Expert
I reviewed The Saatva Classic Mattress in a simulated bedroom environment with solo sleepers and couples (mattress placed on solid deck surface of platform bed, queen size). All of the ratings were based on averages of the subjects who participated, and data for reviews was also obtained by evaluating actual owner reviews found on different third party review web sites.
Overall Comfort– initial feel, level of immersion, initial body contact experience, choose from Plush Soft, Luxury Firm, and Firm options overall rating for all three 9
Support– spine alignment, pain relief, pressure relief in 30 minutes or less 9
Solo Sleeper– overall impressions with comfort, ease of turning, back and side 8.5
Couple Experience- sink in middle, snuggling rating, motion transfer 9
Edge Support– as experienced by 190lb test subject 10
Sex– as reported by online reviews and voluntary reporting 9
Bounce, Motion Transfer, And Liveliness 9.5
Cost Value– 1-10 rating based on the quality and value compared to other brands 9.5
Trial Period, Warranty, And General Customer Service Appeal 10
Shipping And Delivery Experience– ease of delivery, ship time, setup 10
Overall Rating Of The Saatva Classic Mattress: 9.4 Excellent
Considerations: Might be pricier for some.
By personally testing samples provided by each manufacturer, shipped in exactly the same manner as you would receive them, he can use his 25 years of manufacturing and design knowledge to quickly rate each brand using specific data points. His experience as a mattress expert keeps you from making a $3,000 mattress mistake!
A Leading Mattress Expert At Your Service
As a mattress expert, Marc has invented, designed and manufactured, marketed, and sold almost every conceivable kind of mattress in the industry from latex to memory foam, airbeds, hybrids, even futon mattresses. No other mattress review site has better industry experience.
When not working as a consultant to many of the worlds largest mattress retailers and manufacturers, Marc reviews mattresses sold online and has carefully created a curated list of quality mattresses from dealers who focus on one thing- making fantastic beds for their customers.
Marc is an established authority on mattress engineering and design, components, and using sustainable and green materials in mattress manufacturing. His web site, Habitat Furnishings, LLC, initially launched in 2004, was the first e-commerce platform to introduce natural latex bedding products to America.
Marc’s knowledge of green, non-toxic, and hypoallergenic textiles, safer, formaldehyde free foams, and safe FR (fire retardant) fabrics in the industry makes him highly sought after as a consultant and advisor. As a mattress expert,
Unlike the larger, profit driven “mattress reviews” sites that exist only to mine commissions, The Mattress Buyer Guide uses trust and authority driven information based on realtime experience in the mattress design and fabrication industry to help consumers navigate their way through hundreds of brands to find a comfortable, supportive, safe, and healthy mattress to call their own.
There are no other mattress review sites that can evaluate and recommend mattresses using industry experience, and this results in thousands of people being mismatched with mattresses they should not have purchased.
The Mattress Buyer Guide Takes The Mystery And Misery Out Of Mattress Shopping
As a mattress expert, Marc worked in the trenches, testing and researching mattress components, handpicking the ingredients and sleep testing beds himself, and has created over 150 best selling beds for his web sites and his retail stores through the years.
Unlike the digital marketing companies that “review” mattresses alongside of appliances and home furnishings products, Marc’s journey in the bedding industry began with a small retail store in Alexandria, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. Here’s a picture of his very first retail location opened on August 1, 1994.
Starting From Humble Beginnings: A Mattress Expert’s Journey
He quickly grew one store into several, and in 1998 became one of the first bedding retailers on the web. By 2009, he was the CEO of one of the three highest volume online mattress stores, long before Casper, Purple, Nectar, and other brands even existed.
In fact, along with a small handful of courageous online retailers, he helped pioneer the bed in a box concept almost 20 years ago, long before the owners of today’s popular foam mattress web sites were even out of high school.
Marc knows every single scam in the business, especially after designing over 150 mattresses himself and pioneering the ubiquitous “bed in a box” category.
These days, it’s tempting and very easy to find and buy a $1000 mattress that looks great, feels wonderful, and delivers a rock star level of hype. But the quality of the components and the manufacturing techniques used often do not provide value and durability-and most mattress shoppers are not provided with an honest and transparent understanding of the most intimate product they will ever buy.
Unfortunately, many beds sold out there today are what industry experts like Marc call “limited lifespan commodities“, in other words, a mattress designed to last just beyond the warranty- or even worse- just beyond the trial period allowing you to return it for your money back.
“Most mattresses sold online are made using inferior components that break down quickly. The industry has become so competitive that manufacturers are forced to sacrifice quality in many cases”.
-Marc Anderson, Bedding Industry Pioneer And Mattress Expert
A few years ago, the mattress industry exploded. Dozens of startup companies crashed the conventional bedding business by creating an entirely new breed of bed, almost all of which use cutting edge ingredients and razor sharp marketing and advertising. How many mattress commercials do you see every day pitching you the world’s best bed? Hundreds of options to choose from, all with the same pitch, and what appears to be the identical mattress, or at least close.
More consumers who buy their mattress online choose one of our brands over almost every other retailer. The reason? Relying on a seasoned mattress expert with over 25 years of experience. Nine out of ten online retailers selling mattresses are not bedding experts at all.
In fact, thy have little or no experience making mattresses and rely on third party fabricators to design and create their brand, their logo, their web site, and many of the CEO’s of these companies, if they sat down for coffee with our CEO, would likely be ground down pretty fast.
The end result of these companies, who rely largely on venture capital to stay afloat, will eventually fold up their tents. We’ve watched them come and go. Marc’s curated Trusted Dealer portfolio includes many companies who bench build their mattresses in small batches, or are operated by CEO’s who earned their expertise by working in the bedding industry trenches.
Since 2007, Reviewing And Testing Is What We Do
We are the oldest and most established mattress buyer guide site on the internet, originally established in 2007 by memory foam mattress expert David Rosenberg.
Our goal is to provide easy to understand, honest, and unbiased mattress recommendations that put all of the sites you will find on our pages on the same level playing field. And with 25 years of mattress industry experience, you’ll find nothing but rich information on our Where To Buy page that tells you not only why you might want to choose a particular mattress, but what’s inside of them and what to look for when shopping for a bed.
You’ll be taught a lot if you read our content, and will probably have a host of questions to ask either in an online chat, or to a sales person in a retail store. Bottom line, you’ll won’t be second guessing yourself after your purchase. Here, you’ll get just the facts, no fake mattress reviews, no payoffs from mattress companies.