Three business-school graduates and a questionnaire.

Helix Sleep is a New York City online mattress company that officially launched on 4 August 2015, according to an Entrepreneur report by Catherine Clifford republished by Fortune that day. Its co-founders were Kristian von Rickenbach, Adam Tishman and Jerry Lin, who had graduated from business school that May and had started work on the company while still studying; before that, the report said, they had worked at companies such as Goldman Sachs and Google. English Wikipedia, citing the company, dates the founding itself to January 2015.

The launch report contrasted Helix with Casper, which offered one mattress for everyone: Helix set out to match the mattress to the sleeper. At launch, customers took a quiz about their body, their sleeping routine and their mattress preferences, and an algorithm that used 3-D modelling of the human body then recommended a mattress, the Entrepreneur report said. Fast Company, as summarised by the trade title Sleep Review in 2015, described a questionnaire about height, weight, sleeping position and preferred firmness, with the company saying its mattresses combined latex, microcoils and foam.

Von Rickenbach told Entrepreneur that two very differently built people sharing a bed need different things from a mattress. His example was a 6ft 5in man and a 5ft 2in woman of very different weights. Helix answered that with a partner option, in which each half of a single mattress could be made to a different specification. He also called the mattress industry “fundamentally flawed,” describing the shopping experience as confusing.

Each mattress was custom built in a factory in Chicago, the report said, and shipped to the customer’s door in a box about the size of a case of golf clubs, expanding to full size once unpacked; it came with a 100-night guarantee. The three co-founders, the report added, were then running the company with only a small handful of contractors, interns and staff. In September 2025 the Helix website still invited visitors to “Take the Sleep Quiz.”

A range named after the hours of the night.

By 2025 Helix sold a named range. On the company’s website in September 2025, the mattresses were called Midnight, Dusk, Sunset, Twilight, Moonlight and Dawn — every one a time of day around nightfall or daybreak — and were sold in three collections, Core, Luxe and Elite, each offered in soft, medium and firm feels. The site also listed a Kids mattress and a Plus mattress alongside toppers, bases, pillows and bedding.

The website described each model by its feel and by the sleeping position it suited, from side sleepers to back and stomach sleepers, and pointed undecided buyers back to the quiz.

Helix also used its name to launch other lines. English Wikipedia, citing company press releases, says it introduced Birch, a natural-materials sleep brand, in May 2019 and the modular sofa brand Allform in May 2020; Wikipedia, citing the Allform website, says Allform closed its online store in March 2025. Birch remained part of the group: BedTimes magazine listed it among the family’s brands in January 2023.

Online mattress brands and their owners.

The seven brands in this group are all mattress names: Silentnight, Relyon, Eve, Layla, Helix, Leesa and Dunlopillo. Mattress brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from long-established factory names sold through bed shops and department stores to younger companies that began by selling online and delivering a mattress rolled up in a box, and a single name can change hands more than once while the product on the shop floor looks much the same.

A mattress brand’s identity is usually carried less by the product itself, which is mostly hidden under a sheet, than by a name, a label stitched to the side, the box it arrives in and the advertising around it. The company behind that name may have been sold, gone through administration, seen its name pass to different owners in different countries or moved its making elsewhere. 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 how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a New York start-up to one of the 3Z brands.

In 2021 Helix Sleep and the mattress maker Brooklyn Bedding combined in partnership with the private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, Bedding News Now and BedTimes reported. The combined business bought Bear Mattress in July 2022, and in January 2023 it adopted the corporate name 3Z Brands, headquartered in Arizona and New York. BedTimes reported on 26 January 2023 that the name stands for the three z’s of “catch some Zs,” and that Helix, Brooklyn Bedding, Birch and Bear would keep their own websites and branding, with 3Z serving only as the unifying corporate name; Adam Tishman was quoted as Helix’s co-founder. The group went on to buy Nolah Sleep in February 2023 and Leesa in March 2023, Bedding News Now reported, and English Wikipedia, citing Bedding News Now and the Nashville Post, says it bought the Nashville mattress maker Southerland in December 2024.

Manufacturing sits with the group. English Wikipedia, citing the company, says Helix mattresses are made in the Phoenix area. In a release dated 7 October 2026, 3Z Brands said it had completed an expansion of its main factory, the “Dream Factory” in Glendale, Arizona, which opened with its headquarters in March 2022, and that it runs factories in Glendale and Phoenix, Oklahoma City and Nashville. The release said the expansion added space for curing and storing foam and a new moulded-pillow operation, and that Arizona’s Brydant Real Estate led the project with Deutsch Architecture Group as architects. When the 3Z name was introduced in 2023, BedTimes reported, it was to appear on the Arizona factory and in press and recruiting material, while shoppers would keep seeing the Helix name.

For a design guide, Helix Sleep shows how a direct-to-consumer brand can make the buying process itself — a questionnaire — its signature, and then carry a single idea, the hours of the night, through every product name. Compare Leesa, the Virginia Beach brand that joined the same group in 2023, and Casper, the bed-in-a-box brand that early coverage of Helix measured it against. For this guide we use a midnight navy with dusk amber and a linen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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