Our Story

Our journey started back in 1985 when our founder, Marie Lapointe, was diagnosed with a handful of food and environmental allergies. When she went about trying to reduce allergens in her home, she couldn't find any healthy mattress options for her or her young kids. That's when a friend told her about these new cotton-based mattresses she’d heard of called futons. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, she thought this was the perfect opportunity for her family. Before her dream could come to fruition, she needed to find the right suppliers and a location to build the mattress.

The 1980’s – The Beginning

After finally finding a supplier for raw cotton batting - these things weren’t easy pre-internet - and an inexpensive location in Surrey - she was finally in business. At first, the plan was to wholesale mattresses, but futons weren’t well known then, so we needed to sell them ourselves. All the mattresses would be made in the back and sold out in the front. Direct-to-consumer before an internet marketing tool.  Thankfully, the timing was good, and soon after, futons began exploding in popularity. The original location quickly became too small for both, so a dedicated manufacturing facility was set up and a dedicated South Surrey mattress store. Our first Vancouver futon store soon followed that.  

The 1990’s – The Futon Decade

Now, with multiple stores and a growing wholesale base, more products were added, and the manufacturing facility was once again expanded to accommodate the growing business. At different points over the decade, we opened locations in Abbotsford, Burnaby, Langley, North Vancouver, and Victoria. Some were short-lived temporary locations, while others, like our flagship location at 4th and Burrard, where most people know us from, remained open for decades. By the late 90s, the wholesale business reached every corner of North America, and retail had settled into a few key locations around Metro Vancouver. However, the 90s marked the peak for futons and Canadian manufacturers, and the following decade would bring rapid change on every front.

The 2000’s – A Decade of Change 

The 2000’s were transformative in many ways. Technology was starting to become part of daily life, manufacturing was moving rapidly offshore, and futons had reached their peak popularity. Many local manufacturers faced an existential crisis and had to make tough decisions. Most shut their doors. Others became importers to remain competitive. We decided to do a little bit of both. Although we stopped manufacturing our wood furniture (bed and futon frames), we remained committed to manufacturing our mattresses locally. This is when we first started experimenting with latex.

For the next few years, we played around with various types of latex. In those early days, it was mostly blended Dunlop and Talalay latex, as natural Dunlop latex was only available by the container load. We also started importing natural Dunlop latex mattresses from Malaysia. We continued along that path for several years, and although it served us well, we knew we could make a better latex mattress using the techniques we’d honed with our futon mattresses.

The 2010’s – A New Era

By this point, our focus was solely on building a better latex mattress. We tried natural latex from several suppliers in Sri Lanka and India until we settled on Organic Dunlop Latex from Kerala, Southern India. Organic latex was a little different in those early days. At that time, there wasn't even an organic certification for the finished latex foam. It was simply made from USDA-certified farms. It wasn’t until several years later that the Control Union came out with the Global Organic Latex Standard (GOLS), and once again, we were amongst – if not the first - people to carry a GOLS-certified latex product in Canada. Although we still made cotton mattresses, the latex business grew so fast that it overtook our futon volume in short order. We were now a latex mattress company.

Although our volume was growing rapidly and our technical expertise was maturing, the most prominent mattress story around this time was the rise of the mattress-in-a-box. Venture capital turned a long-used packaging method into the hottest mattress trend, giving rise to endless new entrants selling variations of the same thing made by someone else. Cheap foam mattresses weren’t really our thing, but buying a mattress online was normalized. Physical retail locations were becoming much more expensive to operate, and prominent locations weren’t as important as they used to be, so we moved our flagship Kitsilano location just around the corner to Burrard and 5^th.  Then it happened.

The 2020’s – COVID

Once again, a new decade brought along another seismic shift in how business is done. When the world was shut down, we weren't comfortable leaving our fate in the hands of politicians, so we decided to return to our roots and permanently closed our retail stores. Our return to our original factory-direct model gave us the flexibility to navigate the turbulent waters ahead unencumbered by what has been. 

Now, here we are. Almost having gone in a full circle. Our original suppliers and competitors are long gone. The original locations have been redeveloped. Yet our original business model is the model of the future, and buying local is trendy once again. We’re far from perfect. There are situations we could have handled better, and a few decisions could have gone better. However, we’re proud to have been making healthier mattresses in our family-owned factories for 40 years without sacrificing the core principles we were founded on. It's been a long journey constantly adapting to a changing world, but we remain as committed as ever to continuing our legacy as Metro Vancouver’s premier natural mattress maker for decades to come.