Creating a Mattress by Hand

Matthew, one of our founders, has created a video to explain how our mattresses are created by hand.

Read a transcript of the video below:

When I first started visiting bed factories about 10-12 years ago. I was amazed by how much was done by hand and how important that craftsmanship is in mattress production.

The Sewing Room

When an order first goes to the bed factory it starts in the sewing room. They cut the correct length of border cloth by hand and then they start to cut each panel putting the handles in place and the vents.

The sewing room is an amazing place to visit. There are some really skilled people making look easy what is actually a really tough job.

The Spring Shop

We then go across to the spring shop. The springs are all reinforced with an edge wire that’s hog-ringed by hand onto the spring unit. This gives extra support on the edge of the mattress and stops you feeling like you are rolling out.

The Fillings Area

Then we go across to the fillings area. Fillings are layered one on top of each other on the springs that we saw earlier and this is where some of that material that we saw earlier in the sewing room comes together.

So the border is put onto the outside of the springs, the fillings are layered up one by one and then comes the top cover.

So far it just looks like stacking filling layers, but actually these guys are amazing at what they do.

Because there are so many fillings in the mattress and that layer is so thick a Kimble is used with a tag gun just to hold everything together until we move across to the tape edging station.

The Tape Edger

The next bit I love to watch.

This is the tape-edger. The tape-edger is one of the most skilled jobs in the factory. It takes about two years to learn how to do this to an extent that the experts wouldn’t notice that you’re still a novice.

Walking backwards the top filling is pulled in towards the border. The border is pulled up and the tape edge seals everything together.

The Tufting Area

Next, we go across to the tufting area. Tufting is one of those jobs that has been the same through generations. The mattress is compressed to make it nice and thin and then using a really long needle the tuft is forced through the mattress, caught on the other side by someone else who attaches the bottom tuft. This is repeated for every tuft in the mattress, a different pattern for each different size and this is what holds all of the fillings together, stops them moving around and makes the mattress last an awful lot longer.

You can view the mattresses made by Andy, Keith, Scott & their team in their Wiltshire factory over on our Mattresses Page.