Purveyors of bedding -- sheets, duvets, comforters, featherbeds -- also are benefiting from the focus on sleep. And, where once there was a mere pillow, there now are specialty pillows piled high.
At the Cotton House Resort on Mustique Island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a "pillow menu" is placed on every bed. It contains 11 drawings and descriptions of pillows -- including a butterfly shape, a body pillow, neck roll, snore-stopper, half moon, maternity and buckwheat-hull. Simonique Jack, a manager at the resort, e-mailed to say that 95 percent of her guests choose an extra pillow from the menu.
And, of course, when you sleep on a $3,000 bed, it would be silly to have scratchy sheets.
Until the 1980s, most middle-class homemakers used simple muslin sheets with thread counts (an indication of how tightly woven a material is) from 140 to 180 threads per inch. But in the early 1980s -- about when Martha Stewart's first line of sheets appeared in Kmarts -- Egyptian and Pima cotton sheets with thread counts of 400 began to be seen in upscale stores. Now even middle-class homemakers are on the prowl for sheets with thread counts approaching 800 -- even though a high thread count doesn't necessarily mean it is the best sheet.
Where some see a national preoccupation, others suspect delusion, especially when it comes to mattresses.
Rafael Pelayo is a neurologist at the Sleep Disorder Clinic at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He says that companies that make or sell mattresses sponsor most of the "science" or "clinical studies" that support the notion that sleep is improved by a new mattress. He also noted that mattress retailers cannily air TV commercials late at night, during the hours when insomniacs are flipping the channels, vulnerable to anything they are told will put them to sleep.
But there's no denying the rush to better bedding. It's in the numbers:
The International Sleep Products Association, a trade group, reports that nearly 20 percent of American mattresses sold in 2003 cost at least $1,000. In 2000, 15.5 percent cost that much. The top 25 bedding retailers increased their 2002 sales of $3.02 billion to $3.37 billion in 2003 -- an 11.7 percent increase.
Stearns & Foster, the luxury arm of Sealy Inc., sold $250 million worth of mattress sets in 2003 compared with $35 million in 1994.
In August, Latex Foam International announced the construction of two new plants -- for a total of four in the United States -- that will make so-called Talalay foam. Tempur-Pedic is breaking ground on its second U.S. plant, a $90 million facility in New Mexico. (The company has plants in Duffield, Va., and in Denmark.) And on Friday, King Koil became the first bedding manufacturer to announce a program that will allow customers to design their own beds from a menu of coils, encased coils, polyurethane core, viscoelastic foam, latex foam -- and more.
