Review: Sleeping with Emma – Quality & Comfort at a Fair Price

If you’re like me, sometimes scrolling through Instagram or Facebook you’ll see a random ad pop up. Maybe it’s because I have back problems but somehow those freaky algorithms know I need a good mattress. There’s a lot of online mattress brands out there and without looking into it carefully I assumed they were all just selling the same thing packaged under a different brand name. I was familiar with brands like Ecosa and Koala, these ads frequently popped up for me but less so with a brand called Emma. I knew nothing about them, but assumed they just jumped on the bandwagon and chose the name “E” name to follow Ecosa. Fair disclosure, I’m not paid to promote any brand but I received a mattress to try out for the review.

Anyway it turns out I was wrong and I was surprised to learn that Emma was actually founded in Germany back in 2015 and now sells in 21 countries over 5 continents. I can’t speak to how the Emma mattress compares to an Ecosa or Koala or other online mattress brands because I don’t have a frame of reference. I can say however, that it was the Choice® #1 top scoring mattress in 2021 & 2022 – that must mean something. What I can tell you is my experience having slept my whole life on store bought mattresses.

In the past your traditional brands like King Coil, SleepMaker and Sealy dominated the market with their traditional spring mattresses. Then of course you have your exorbitantly priced Tempur memory foam mattresses. However, buying mattresses has evolved over the last decade. Sure there are some still specialist stores left but with the decline of physical retail and department stores, where can you buy them from now? The growth of online “mattress in a box” companies has been huge but having problems with my back, I was always very cautious about finding a quality mattress. Traditional mattresses were big, solid and heavy. It was what I was used to, and I judged quality based on these factors. I felt like I needed a mattress that had hundreds of coil springs in different zones and extra comfort padding on top. This also makes the mattress quite high and finding fitted mattress sheets with enough depth can be challenging.

When given the opportunity to try the Emma Comfort Mattress, I jumped at the chance to try something new. My current mattress was getting a little old, with definite sagging creating a pot hole for my body at night and back pain to greet me in the mornings. The process to order an Emma mattress is simple as going to their website, adding to cart and checking out like the online shopping your used to. Emma says that once you order, your mattress will arrive in 4-7 working days. Mine arrived in about 5 days which is great. You get tracking which even shows you the location of the driver on the day your mattress is meant to arrive. The only frustrating thing was not actually knowing when the driver would arrive despite being able to track their location. It did arrive eventually and the driver was helpful and prepared with a trolley. The mattress arrives in a box as you’d expect. It’s not overly big considering there’s a queen sized mattress in there. You could never handle and get a traditional mattress into your home by yourself, but with the Emma mattress it’s pretty easy. The box itself only weighs about 9kg and even has handles built into the side. I’d still recommend having the trolley to wheel it in easier.

Set up is a breeze, just bring the box close to your bed, open the box and roll out the vacuum packed mattress. Carefully cut the plastic wrapping off the mattress and the mattress will re-inflate itself to normal size on its own. So it took me about 2 minutes to set it up. You need to let the mattress expand for a good 4-6 hours preferably and it may take up to 24 hours before it fully expands to normal size.

The mattress looks great, it’s a simple, clean and attractive with a washable mattress cover. The website will make it seem like there’s 4 layers to the Emma Comfort Mattress, but really it’s 2 plus the covers. The white top is the Fresh Air Comfort Cover and is made from a climate control fibre that regulates humidity and keeps moisture away. Inside the top layer of the mattress is made from Emma’s Airgocell®, a point-elastic which allows one area of your mattress to compress without impacting the rest. This means that there is motion isolation and tossing and turning won’t disturb your partner. The main component of the mattress is the HRX Foam layer which is made with special zoning technology for proper hip, shoulder, and spinal alignment.

I set mine up in the morning so I could go out for the day and come back to a ready mattress. Later that afternoon when I came home I checked in on the mattress. Immediately I saw that it had bounced back to its full shape, but it was about half the thickness of my original mattress. I have to say, that worried me a little. How could this thin and light mattress give me a better sleep experience than my solid high pillow top mattress with pocket coil springs? Well there was only one way to know… just sleep.

Having used the Emma Comfort Mattress now for 2 weeks, I can honestly say it is the best mattress I’ve ever had. I didn’t have any troubles falling asleep. With traditional mattress you either had soft, medium or firm type and you could feel the hardness in a firm mattress. With the Emma mattress, it’s soft comfortable but has a strong support behind it without the resistance pushing against you. It definitely moulds to your body but you don’t sink into it. I’ve not had a single night of bad sleep or back pain since using the mattress. That’s pretty extraordinary to me. I was worried that the mattress would get hot as I tend to sleep hot, but to my surprise it managed to stay relatively cool. It definitely retained some warmth so it’s not by any means a cooling effect that I felt, but it wasn’t unpleasant and I really didn’t notice it (especially when asleep).

The Emma Comfort Mattress retail price for a Queen was $1,599 but like most online retailers there’s usually some sort of sale available. Right now you can grab it for 50% off bringing it to just under $800. The Emma Comfort Mattress is the company’s original product and now lowest end of their range. Given my positive experience on this mattress I’m really curious what the top range Emma Diamond Hybrid Mattress is like to sleep on at almost double the price.

The online mattress market has so many options ranging from $200 to over $3,000, so I’d still advise some caution in buying and possibly price may correlate to quality to some extent. But Emma has a 100-night trial with a money-back guarantee and comes with a 10-year warranty. Delivery and returns are completely free nationwide. So if you want to give it a try, there’s really no risk to you.

https://www.emma-sleep.com.au/