AirFoam and its founding team.

Nolah is a mattress brand built around a foam. Its founders created it in 2016 when they were looking for an alternative to memory foam, Sleepopolis reported in February 2023, naming its co-founders as Daniel Galle and Anna Hjoellund. Nolah’s own About page, as archived in July 2017, described “a sleep technology company on a mission to improve your sleep and mattress shopping experience,” and introduced Hjoellund and Galle as its founding team and as the inventors of an earlier sleep product, SilkFX.

The company began in Colorado. Its website footer in 2017 gave an office address in Denver, and the trade magazine BedTimes still described Nolah as Colorado-based in February 2023. It sold online, shipping mattresses compressed in a box — “Delivered in a Box,” as its 2017 site put it — with a 120-night trial, and the 2017 site said it was sold exclusively online. Its menu then gave the same weight to a “Wildlife” page as to the shop and its reviews.

Its central idea was a material. The 2017 About page said the company set out to improve upon memory foam and latex, which it called outdated materials, and that after testing hundreds of foam formulations it arrived at the Nolah AirFoam mattress, a three-layer design. It presented AirFoam as temperature neutral because, it said, the foam contained no viscoelastic chemicals, unlike memory foam; those are the company’s claims. The name has lasted: Nolah still markets what it calls “proprietary AirFoam® technology” today, in its Signature mattresses and an AirFoam Luxe topper.

Into 3Z Brands, 2023.

On 14 February 2023, 3Z Brands — the group formed when Cerberus Capital Management combined Brooklyn Bedding and Helix Sleep in 2021, renamed the month before — announced it had acquired Nolah. BedTimes reported the deal that day, describing 3Z as the corporate identity for Helix Sleep, Brooklyn Bedding, Birch and Bear, headquartered in Arizona and New York, and saying Nolah would keep operating under its own brand name. John Merwin, 3Z’s chief executive, said: “We’re thrilled to welcome Nolah to our 3Z family.” Nolah’s chief executive at the time, Stephen Light, said combining Nolah’s technology with 3Z’s expertise could open new doors for product development.

Manufacturing was part of the logic. Speaking to Bedding News Now the same day, Merwin said: “There are synergies on the manufacturing side, and we’re going to start manufacturing all their product.” Light told the publication that the company planned “to keep pushing the boundaries of mattress technology with affordable solutions to everyday sleep disruptions.” English Wikipedia, citing Furniture Today, records Nolah as 3Z’s second acquisition in seven months; Leesa followed in March 2023. Merwin added that 3Z would “be able to expand products and have some more options for retailers and their customers,” while Nolah kept its own name, website and range.

3Z Brands has owned Nolah since February 2023. The group’s later moves — buying Southerland, a Nashville manufacturer, in December 2024, and moving production from the former Southerland plant in Tualatin, Oregon, to its main Phoenix facility in 2025 — are recorded by English Wikipedia, citing Bedding News Now and BedTimes.

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.

Designed and assembled in Arizona.

Today Nolah’s website says every mattress is “designed and assembled at our state-of-the-art facility in Arizona,” made to order “using foreign and domestic parts,” and that the company does its own coiling, foam pouring, cutting, lamination and sewing in-house. Those are Nolah’s statements; the site’s footer names Brooklyn Bedding, LLC as copyright holder and links to a 3Z Brands ESG report. Its range has grown from the single AirFoam mattress to lines including the Original, the Evolution, the Signature and the Natural, along with an Alaskan King size, bed frames, upholstered and floor beds for children, toppers, pillows and bedding. The naming habit has continued: the 2017 site marked AirFoam with a ™, today’s pages use ®, and newer coined names include Tri-Zone foam, a GlacioTex mattress protector and an ArcticCore gel pillow. It also offers discounts to military, healthcare, first-responder and teacher customers. Its old address, nolahmattress.com, now redirects to nolahsleep.com.

The early brand carried a cause. In 2017 its website promised “One Nolah Mattress Sold = One Wildlife Adopted”: for every mattress sold, it said, it would adopt an endangered American animal through its wildlife conservation partner, Defenders of Wildlife, letting customers choose from more than 20 species and sending each an official adoption certificate. It named bald eagles, snowy owls, polar bears, dolphins and sea otters as the animals its customers chose most often.

For a design guide, Nolah shows how a start-up can hang its identity on a single named material and keep that name through a change of owner. Compare Helix Sleep, the brand whose 2021 combination with Brooklyn Bedding created its owner, and Birch, a stablemate at 3Z Brands. For this guide we use slate blue, an air blue and cloud white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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