We saw this post on Reddit recently. We want to take the opportunity to provide our perspective and experience to this conversation so here’s our recollection of how the term hybrid came about.
If you were researching mattresses online around 2010 or earlier, you were probably reading posts on What’s the Best Mattress which had an active forum and was kind of the Reddit of its day. There was a lot of negative sentiment toward spring mattresses back then and people viewed them as cheap or low-quality. The hybrid term gave spring mattresses a marketing facelift and a chance to have a new conversation around comfort and support that comes from a spring mattress.
It started as a marketing term. Back in 2012, Leggett & Platt coined the term when Mark Quinn and Mark Kinsley were leading their marketing team. At the time, all-foam mattresses were gaining popularity and spring mattresses were losing ground. Leggett & Platt wanted to grow the use of springs specifically their branded ComfortCore pocket coil unit so they launched a campaign to promote this new category. To help retailers and consumers understand what a hybrid mattress was, they partnered with Second City to produce a music video: Leggett & Platt’s Get Hybrid (Furniture Today).
Their intent was to rebrand spring mattresses by moving away from the old-school perception of open-coil designs. At the time, Simmons (makers of the Beautyrest mattress) held the trademark on the term pocket coil so Leggett & Platt needed a new way to differentiate their pocket coil units from traditional open coils and to compete with the rising popularity of all-foam mattresses. That’s where the word hybrid came in. It was meant to refer specifically to a mattress that used their pocket coil as their music video explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTlIzH9jQI4.
The goal was to draw a clear distinction between pocket coil mattresses and traditional open-coil models and all foam mattresses but without a hard definition of what exactly qualifies as a hybrid. The video itself only features quilted mattresses being promoted as hybrids, which would’ve helped contrast them against their main competition at the time mainly Tempur-Pedic whose beds typically featured smooth, flat covers. Plus, at the time, Leggett owned Gribetz, the company that made quilting machines for mattress manufacturers, so it was in their best interest to promote quilted mattresses.
In the end, there’s still no clearly defined or universally accepted standard in the industry for what makes a mattress a hybrid. If we go back to the originators, a hybrid was simply a mattress with a pocket coil and foam above it. Whether it needs to be one-sided, quilted, or meet other criteria is still up for debate.
Our assumption back when the term was first launched was that a hybrid meant a mattress using Leggett & Platt’s ComfortCore or a pocket coil with some foam above the coils, a one-sided construction, and a quilted cover. By that definition, almost any pocket coil mattress being made at the time could qualify as a hybrid. Which would make sense, since Leggett was looking to promote their pocket coil and wouldn’t have wanted to define it too narrowly.
But over time, the meaning has evolved and shifted and today there still isn’t a clearly defined standard. The International Sleep Products Association (ISPA) doesn’t publish a definition of hybrid. Their sister publication, Sleep Savvy Magazine does offer one: “Hybrid: Commonly used industry term for a mattress that combines an innerspring unit with specialty foams such as viscoelastic or latex.”
Of course, like all industry terms, the definition has evolved. Every brand and retailer seems to have its own spin on what counts as a hybrid based on their product lineup and marketing narrative.
If you look at Google Trends, the term hybrid mattress didn’t see any meaningful search volume until around June 2013. That’s likely when the Leggett & Platt campaign began to take hold and other brands started adopting the term.
