A St Paul workshop and a naming contest.

King Koil began in 1898 in St Paul, Minnesota, as the United States Bedding Company. The company says Samuel Bronstein founded it, starting with six employees in a small factory. English Wikipedia, citing the 2019 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the firm’s old factory, adds that Samuel and Anna Bronstein, with five employees, first sewed the cloth covers of their mattresses in the owners’ home, and gives 1905 as the year the business was incorporated as United States Bedding Co.

In 1927 the company moved to a site on Vandalia Street in St Paul’s Saint Anthony Park neighbourhood. That factory building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020, and in January 2016 the local newspaper Park Bugle ran a feature on the old King Koil plant. Wikipedia says the business was still owned by the Bronstein family after the Second World War, and that in the 1980s it left St Paul and moved its headquarters to a suburb of Chicago.

The name came out of the Depression. The company says that during the 1930s it “greatly improved the bedspring” and went looking for a new name for the product. According to Wikipedia, it sponsored a public naming contest; the winning entry, King Koil, came from Era Bell Thompson of North Dakota. The mattress name caught on and eventually became the name of the company itself.

A licence carried around the world.

For much of its later history King Koil was a licensed name as much as a factory. BedTimes, the trade magazine of the mattress industry, reported in December 2024 that the brand’s presence abroad began to grow in the mid-1960s and widened through the 1970s and 1980s as it aligned with mattress makers around the world. In October 2019 the same magazine described King Koil as a company that “had evolved into a mattress licensing group.”

Counts of that network vary by date and source. When a Malaysian investor bought into the business in May 2016, it told Bursa Malaysia that King Koil products were sold in more than 80 countries through agreements with 31 licensees, and that the licensing model earned its revenue mainly from royalties, The Edge reported. English Wikipedia gives more than 30 licensees in over 90 countries as of 2019; BedTimes in 2024 put the figure at more than 24 licensees in more than 80 countries. The company’s own website says King Koil mattresses can be found in more than 80 countries.

In the United States the company went back to making mattresses itself. BedTimes reported in October 2019 that since its 2015 sale King Koil had “reverted back to its roots as a direct manufacturer,” with a plant in Avondale, Arizona, near Phoenix, that opened in May 2018 and sold into 17 states, while production and distribution in the eastern half of the country were handled through a partnership with Blue Bell Mattress, a former longtime licensee. In December 2019 the company moved its US headquarters there from Willowbrook, Illinois.

The BedTimes profile of December 2024 named its chief executive, David Binke, who joined in 2017, and described its ranges: SmartLife, with what the company calls patented body-sensing technology; the Intimate collection, which it called its largest and most successful; and ReSpun, made with glueless pocketed coils, bio-based foams and ticking of recycled denim. “Everything is under the King Koil brand,” Binke told the magazine.

Mattresses and the people who make them.

The seven brands in this group all make or sell mattresses: King Koil, Sleepmaker, Birch, Nolah, Zinus, Amerisleep and PlushBeds. Mattress brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names licensed to independent factories in many countries to companies that sell online and ship a mattress compressed in a box, and a single name can belong to a much larger bedding or furniture group.

A mattress brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself, which looks much like its rivals once it is on a bed, than by a name, a label, a box and the advertising around it, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, licensed its mark or moved its production. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its mattresses are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its mattresses are made and what materials it names — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From St Paul to Malaysia, Hong Kong and Arizona.

Ownership of the name has moved through Asia. In 2015 King Koil, by then a licensing company, was acquired by its Malaysian licensee, Kaiserkorp Corp, BedTimes reported; a filing quoted by The Edge in May 2016 said Kaiserkorp completed the purchase in the first quarter of 2015. On 13 May 2016 Kumpulan Perangsang Selangor (KPS), a Malaysian listed company, agreed to buy 60% of Kaiserkorp from its owner, Yeoh Jin Hoe, who kept 40%, The Edge reported.

In January 2024 a KPS subsidiary agreed to sell a 50% interest in Kaiserkorp, whose subsidiary owns the King Koil brand and related intellectual property, to AI Dream (HK) Ltd, The Sun of Malaysia reported on 10 January 2024. In April 2024 the US trade press reported the deal as AI Dream’s acquisition of King Koil. Home News Now described AI Dream as a sleep-products platform formed in 2018 and bought in 2021 by the private-equity firm Hillhouse Investment, distributing King Koil, Serta and Ruf Betten in Asia and Europe, and said King Koil’s management would stay and the company would keep its name.

The brand presents itself today with the line “We Bring Sleep Home” and the heading “Designed and Handcrafted in the USA,” while its website also says it “manufactures products all over the world” and that its worldwide headquarters is in Avondale.

For a design guide, King Koil shows how a name won in a Depression-era contest can outlast the company that held it and travel the world under licence. Compare Dunlopillo, another bedding name owned market by market, and SleepMaker, an Australian mattress brand that changed hands across the Tasman. For this guide we use navy, ivory and a gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep King Koil’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.