In the newest addition to our mattress executive series, we chatted with Nick Nolan, Co-owner of Aviya. We talked about the design of the Aviya, the advantages of innerspring mattresses, environmental sustainability and more.
Please introduce yourself to our readers, and if you could walk us through how your career lead you to Aviya?
Aviya set out to make a better mattress. And not just another foam gimmick that’s compressed and shoved into a small box. Our goal was improve upon the convention – to build a real mattress, with high quality materials and an innerspring system that provides long term support night after night. Aviya is owned by industry experts that have been in business for over 75 years. We used our years of experience to develop a high quality, comfortable, long-lasting mattress at an unparalleled price.
We have come across a couple of online mattress brands from the Cleveland area, is there something specific to the area that lends itself to mattress production?
Aside from Cleveland being our home and where we are from, the area offers a few unique benefits specifically to our mattress production. The first is the fact that within a 500 mile radius we can reach about 40% of the US population, which helps with shipping costs and times. To piggy-back off a radius factor – the manufacturers of our materials are all within that 500 mile radius as well, again helping us bring those savings back to our customers.
Curious as to why the Aviya is classified as an innerspring, but using pocketed coils. Is there a reason to stay away from the term ‘hybrid’?
We’re not afraid of being classified as ‘hybrid’, that term is often associated with a combination of foam and pocketed coil springs. However, from customer feedback we’ve noticed that term confuses a lot of people that are looking for a traditional innerspring mattress. A lot of our competitors use pocketed coils as another layer versus Aviya, we use pocketed coils as our base to the mattress, for example – a few well known brands use a 3” pocketed coil system in between the base layer and upper layers of foam in their mattresses, where we use an 8” pocketed coil system as the main support of the entire mattress and 3 layers of foam sit on top.
Sticking with the design of the mattress, you don’t see many foam edging on the exterior of the coils. You mention it is utilized to increase edge support, can you expand on that a bit?
What we have done with our edge support is wrapped our entire mattress in 3” of foam making the edges stronger and the mattress feel larger!
Many online brands that launched with an all foam mattress offering are beginning to release models including pocketed coils. Do you feel there is an inherent advantage to utilizing coils in a mattress?
Absolutely! Using a pocketed coil system as our base has been our MO since the very beginning. The advantage is better long term support and motion isolation as well as a mattress that will last longer for our customers.
By offering your mattress in three different firmness options, is it ever a concern where the customer isn’t so sure which would be right for them? How does your customer service team work to be sure each person is finding a mattress that will fit their sleep preferences?
This is one of the top questions that our customer service team fields all day. Based on a few different variables, such as sleeping positions, height/weight, and sleep habits, we have a formula that we use to make sure we get our customers into the right firmness option prior to purchase. It’s never a concern for us, nor our customers, because we offer a 100 night sleep guarantee and they can exchange it for a different firmness during that time period.
It looks like the Aviya is not compressed rolled, and packed in a box like other brands. Is there difficulty in the logistics of dealing with private shipping companies as opposed to UPS or FedEx?
Short answer, yes. Our claim is this is a real mattress, shipped in a box the size they are familiar to when going to a local furniture store, and with that comes some shipping obstacles, especially since we are shipping nationwide. However, we have been working closely with 2 of the top furniture shipping companies to ensure the experience for our customers is similar and/or better than any other time they’ve ordered large items such as furniture or appliances.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions held by the consumer when shopping for a mattress online?
From what we hear from our customers, it’s a combination of the quality of materials used and what sum of all those materials used together provides. The reason I say this, is because our customer base is VERY well educated and have done their research. Most of them have been burned by the all memory foam, gel and air tube gimmics, where in the end they are really looking for a sleep experience they are used to with a luxury innerspring mattress.
Are there any plans in the pipeline to potentially launch other bedroom related products to round out your offering beyond your mattress and foundation?
There are a few things we are working on at the moment. I can’t go into much detail, as our marketing team would be pretty upset if I did, lol. However, we’re excited about the new things we have in development, we should see some things in 2019 that our customers will be super excited about.
Unfortunately, returns do come into play in the online mattress space, are there initiatives on your end to keep mattresses out of landfills?
Yes, Conserving the environment is a priority of ours. Even from the construction of the Aviya mattress, we use as many environmentally friendly materials as possible, for example our flame retardant is 100% natural and made from a mixture of mint seed, flax and cotton. As far as our returns, we usually try to use local donation services as long as the mattress is in a like-new condition. If that’s not an option (some municipalities and/donation services have regulations with pre-owned mattresses), we will pick up the mattress using our shipping providers and have the mattress sent to a vendor we have partnered with that responsibly recycles mattresses.
The space is growing quickly with plenty of new entrants as well as innovative designs of sleep surfaces, where do you see the online mattress world evolving to in the next two years?
There’s always going to be something new that comes out. I remember, gosh this was probably 20+ years ago – my parents bought a waterbed. That was the big craze then, right! The new thing now is all-foam, stuffed in a small box and shipped the next day. I think that is more of a testament to the type of online buying habit we are seeing today. At Aviya, we see a long term play on innerspring mattresses – they’ve held the test of time and it’s something that we see our customers coming back to. We’re excited for what’s to come.