“Claims a dozen companies are infringing on its patent
David Perry — Furniture Today, June 11, 2009
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Memory foam leader Tempur-Pedic has sued more than a dozen other bedding producers for allegedly infringing on a patent protecting the design and construction of Tempur-Pedic’s mattresses.The suit claims patent violations by some of the biggest names in the bedding industry, including Sealy, Simmons and Serta, the industry’s three largest producers. Also named are Carpenter, Englander, Classic Sleep, Anatomic Global, Bragada, Essentia, IR Specialty Foam, Jeffco Fibres, Spirit Sleep, World Sleep Products, Serta Restokraft Mattress and Sleep Products Inc.
Bedding observers said they had never seen a leading producer file a suit alleging patent infringement on such a broad scale. There was no immediate response from the companies named in the lawsuit.
Tempur-Pedic said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued patent number 7,507,468 to Tempur-Pedic on March 24, covering a variety of mattress constructions with layers of visco-elastic and other foam materials.
The company filed the suit June 10 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.
“Tempur-Pedic is committed to making significant investments to enhance the performance and durability of our products,” said Matt Clift, executive vice president of global operations at Tempur-Pedic and head of its advanced technology and manufacturing group. “As part of our long-standing investment strategy, we work diligently to protect our proprietary technologies and we will vigorously defend our intellectual property from infringement.”
The patent and lawsuit are not related to the formulation of Tempur-Pedic’s proprietary Tempur material, the company said.”
Our Take-
We know many of these manufacturer. Some of the offer products that stand up to TempurPedic, others make products that are a bit under par. That said, there is not a lot to memory foam mattresses. Good memoryfoam and good base foam are all it takes. It’s not “rocket science” (NASA) as TempurPedic would have you believe.
Tempur-Pedic claims that the suit has nothing to do with their proprietary “tempur material”, but instead has something to do with “other patent infringements.” The only other thing there is their “air flow” layer – which in our opinion is a scam anyway. In memory foam mattresses, the first thing to break down and create body impressions is the convoluted layer between the memory foam top layer and the base layer. Tempur-Pedic claims that it helps the mattress sleep cooler – we would love to see some scientific proof of that. In reality, the only thing we see it doing is offering a smoth transition from the somewhat softer visco (or memory foam) layer and the firmer base layer. It’s also CHEAPER. That’s right…when producing mattresses on a large scale, “air flow” layers reduce the manufacturing cost! Why? When a factory convultes foam, they get more inches of foam out than they put in. For example, a 4 inch piece of foam convoluted will turn into two 2.5? pieces – 5? of foam from 4?! A miracle! When making one or two mattresses, the cost diffrence is nominal, and may even cost more, but when you’re making 10,000 mattresses, that’s a whole lot of foam saved!
Well, enough about the “air flow” layer we believe this suit is over. What we’re getting at is Tempur-Pedic is afraid of competition. In todays market place and economy, people are seeking lower cost alternatives more than ever…and that’s a bad thing for TempurPedic. For the sake of anyone that wants the comfort of memory foam, without the cost of TempurPedic, let’s hope this frivilous lawsuit passes.