A natural line launched in 2019.

Birch is a mattress brand that began inside another one. Helix Sleep, the New York direct-to-consumer mattress company founded in 2015 by Jerry Lin, Kristian von Rickenbach and Adam Tishman, launched it in May 2019 under the name Birch Living; English Wikipedia cites a Helix press release distributed through PR Newswire on 22 May 2019. Birch was presented as Helix’s natural line, and its first website said so plainly.

That website, as archived in July 2019, carried a section headed “Comfort From Helix,” which said the Birch mattress “was designed by Helix” and that Birch took Helix’s work on comfort and applied it to natural and organic materials. It described a hybrid mattress combining wool, latex and steel springs, said each mattress was free of polyurethane-based foams, and carried a “Handmade in the USA” badge. The early range was small: a mattress, a three-inch Plush Pillow Top of organic wool and natural latex, and a pillow. The site’s headline promised “Natural Comfort,” and its menu ran to sections on materials, certifications and sustainability, alongside a 100-night trial and a 25-year warranty — a materials-first structure the brand has kept.

The brand still tells the same story. Its About page today says: “Founded in 2019, Birch Living is Helix Sleep’s all-natural and sustainable sleep brand.” The shop now presents itself simply as Birch, with the copyright line “© Birch,” while the name Birch Living remains in its about and privacy pages. When Cerberus Capital Management announced it had bought Helix in 2021, its press release used a third form, Birch by Helix.

From Helix to 3Z Brands.

Birch changed owners along with its parent. On 13 October 2021, the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management said an affiliate had completed a series of related transactions acquiring Brooklyn Bedding and Helix Sleep and combining them into one direct-to-consumer mattress business. The release named Birch among the Helix brands, saying “Birch by Helix launched in 2019 as the company’s all-natural and sustainable sleep brand.” It said John Merwin, chief executive of Brooklyn Bedding, would lead the combined company, with Helix’s three co-founders leading its direct-to-consumer side.

Brooklyn Bedding brought the factories. Cerberus described it as family owned since 1995, a business that began with two brothers delivering mattresses to customers’ homes, and said it designed and made its whole line at its own manufacturing facility in Phoenix, adding a further plant in Glendale, Arizona, in 2021.

In January 2023 the combined company adopted the corporate name 3Z Brands, covering Helix Sleep, Brooklyn Bedding, Birch, Bear and its wholesale business, according to English Wikipedia, citing Furniture Today. The group kept buying. It acquired Nolah and Leesa in 2023, and, English Wikipedia records, citing Bedding News Now, Southerland, a Nashville mattress manufacturer selling to bricks-and-mortar retailers, in December 2024. In September 2025 BedTimes reported that 3Z was moving production from the former Southerland plant in Tualatin, Oregon, to its main Phoenix facility, English Wikipedia says.

The group that became 3Z Brands has owned Birch, through Helix, since October 2021.

Design and documentation.

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.

Wool, latex, cotton and steel.

Birch’s identity is built on materials rather than on invented technology names. Its 2019 homepage summed them up in four words — “Wool, Latex, Cotton, and Steel” — and promoted what it called its proprietary organic Birch Wool, sourced directly from New Zealand farmers. It explained the choice in plain terms: wool “sustainably sheared from New Zealand sheep,” latex “tapped from trees.” Its About page today lists organic Fair Trade-certified cotton, organic New Zealand wool, natural steel coils and latex certified to GOLS, the Global Organic Latex Standard, sourced from Sri Lanka. The company says all Birch sleep products are GREENGUARD Gold certified, and that its mattresses are made without polyurethane foams or fiberglass, with a minimal amount of water-based adhesive where needed.

On manufacturing, the 2019 site said “Handmade in the USA.” Today Birch says it “designs and manufactures organic mattresses in-house in the USA,” with products “assembled in our Arizona facility.” Those are the company’s statements; English Wikipedia separately records that Helix mattresses are designed and assembled at 3Z’s facility in Phoenix. The current range includes the Natural, the Luxe Natural, the Elite Natural and a Kids Natural mattress, alongside organic cotton sheets and pillowcases. Birch is no longer only an online brand: its website now points shoppers to partner showrooms where they can try a Birch mattress in person.

The early brand also attached a cause to its name. In 2019 its website said, under the heading “Birch For Good,” that it donated 1% of all Birch sales to the National Forest Foundation, with each dollar donated planting one tree in one of the US national forests.

For a design guide, Birch shows how a sub-brand can borrow a parent’s engineering while building a separate identity around natural materials. Compare Helix Sleep, the brand that launched it, and Nolah, a stablemate at 3Z Brands that also says its mattresses are assembled in Arizona. For this guide we use forest green, wool cream and a birch-bark white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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