From a family store’s mattress floor to a mattress of their own.

Layla is an American mattress brand sold mainly online, under the name Layla Sleep. Its founder Akrum Sheikh told its story to the mattress review site Sleepopolis in an interview published there and last updated in June 2021. He said he was born into the trade: his father was a retailer in Connecticut whose family business began as discount variety stores and turned, over the years, into furniture stores, and Sheikh and his siblings grew up in them. He said he loved selling mattresses on the showroom floor.

By 2010, Sheikh said, he and his older brother Akbar had come to distrust the suppliers whose mattresses they sold, including the minimum advertised prices those suppliers required stores to keep. By 2014 they had had enough, and, in his words, “moved to California to start our own mattress brand, Layla!” After two years of work and, he said, thousands of prototypes, the brothers launched the Layla mattress on 1 April 2016.

Selling online was the part they did not know, Sheikh said, although the whole model of the brand was to do away with salespeople, high profit margins, commissions and physical stores. Sheikh told Sleepopolis that they placed an advertisement for someone to run the technical side, and that the reply came from Gregg Dean, who took on the company’s technical operations and digital marketing; the interview describes Dean as chief operations officer, an equal owner and a member of the board. Among the jobs on his résumé, Sheikh listed website developer, graphic designer, digital marketer and drummer. Layla’s own website tells the same origin more briefly, as the story of two friends, “one with family history in the mattress industry, the other with some seriously nerdy skills.”

Soft on one side, firm on the other.

Layla’s identity grew out of a product idea rather than a logo. Sheikh told Sleepopolis that the first mattress was double-sided, with a soft feel on one side and a firm one on the other, so that a customer could buy one mattress and choose between two firmness levels by turning it over. The brand still leads with that idea: its website describes “Two Mattresses in One,” calls the feature Flippable Firmness™, and sells memory foam and hybrid mattresses built to be slept on from either side.

The second signature is a material. From launch the mattress used copper-infused memory foam, Sheikh said, and the company’s current website names its version HR3 Copper™, which it describes as a high-resilience memory foam infused with copper gel. Copper recurs in how the brand presents itself, from its foam names to a page titled “Why Copper.” The company makes its own claims for the material; this guide does not repeat them.

The tone changed in 2019. Sheikh told Sleepopolis that, “as we transition into 2019, Layla has decided to change its entire brand image, voice, look and feel,” moving towards being “awake to life” — the idea that the brand is less about sleep than about the day that follows it. The website’s voice is informal and jokey: its staff call themselves “a bunch of sleep nerds,” and among its short brand films is one titled “A Laylien Encounter.” On its home page the company also presents itself as an “Independently Owned Small Business.”

Mattresses and how they are sold.

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.

Made in America, by its own account.

Layla makes much of where its mattresses are made. Its home page says “Made in the U.S.A.” and “Crafted by American workers,” and a longer page on its website, first published in July 2018 and last updated in April 2022, sets out the chain as the company describes it. Layla says it began in the San Francisco Bay Area “not as an internet startup, but a simple mattress shop,” and that it still runs marketing and development from California and pours much of its foam there; that many of its foam layers are made in Georgia; that the textiles for its covers are woven in North Carolina; and that everything meets in Arizona for final assembly, packing and shipping.

The same page adds a disclosure: when demand exceeds its sewing capacity in North Carolina, the company says, some covers are sewn in Mexico and El Salvador from North Carolina textiles and then shipped back for checking. These are the company’s own statements about its supply chain. The home page also describes its foams as CertiPUR-US certified, a programme the company calls the industry standard.

The business address on Layla’s website today is in New Haven, Connecticut, the brothers’ home state. Alongside its memory foam and hybrid mattresses, a model called The Essential by Layla, the range now includes pillows, toppers, sheets, adjustable bases and weighted blankets, and its comparison pages set Layla against better-known online rivals by name.

For a design guide, Layla shows how a single product feature — a mattress you can flip — can become a brand’s name for itself. Compare Casper, the bed-in-a-box brand Layla’s comparison pages measure itself against, and Leesa, another American online mattress brand. For this guide we use copper, navy and linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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