Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (1)

David Perry

This bedding innovation straight out of Stone Age

From the strange-but-true department: A Korean bedding manufacturer has entered the U.S. market with a rock-hard, heated bed. We are talking real rocks here, folks. Hot rocks, you could say.

Yes, JangSoo Industry Co. has begun selling stone beds to U.S. consumers. Koreans, it seems, already are sold on the benefits of stone beds, which have found a niche here in Korean communities.
And we thought firm bedding was on its way out.

These stone beds are more sophisticated than you might think. The surface of the mattress is made of a smooth layer of stone, anything from quartz to topaz to jade. The heat comes from coils under the stone.

This concept of heating a large stone is not new for Koreans, my research indicates. An article in The Korea Times informed me that "ondol" is a system of heating a stone underneath the floor, thereby giving Koreans a warm floor to sit on, something they like to do.

That same technology, the article said, gave rise to the development of stone beds, filled with either carbon film or copper coils that are electrically heated.

Those beds became "a hot seller" in the late 1990s, the article said.

You may think this is some April Fool's joke that I'm playing on you, but remember, this is September. I must confess that I had never heard of these stone beds before a McClatchy Tribune News Service story told me about some U.S. consumers who swear by these beds.

JangSoo, founded in 1992, says on its Web site that its business is on "a firm basis." I guess so.

As I reflect on this hard teaching, I realize that it's not quite as odd as it sounds. My trip to China earlier this summer confirmed what I have heard for years: that Chinese consumers like really hard beds.

I tried out one bed in a store that felt like a slab of wood covered with a thin layer of fabric. The bed was introduced to me as "a brick." Yes, it was really hard.

Many Chinese still sleep on thin pads on the floor. And I've known a couple of college students close to home who don't have any trouble sleeping on the floor.

The concept of heating the sleep surface certainly isn't new. Remember those heated waterbeds of the 1970s?

So, those heated stone beds, while a novelty in the United States, do have their precedents. Our ancestors all slept on them. The cavemen swore by them in the Stone Age.

I do see one big problem with stone beds: They won't wear out. Thus, there’ll be no replacement market, unless we can convince consumers they really need a more fashionable stone.

That could be a hard sell. But, on the bright side, we could offer them a true lifetime warranty.