Featured image for Meet the First Sustainable, Paper-Wrapped Mattress From Earthfoam

Meet the First Sustainable, Paper-Wrapped Mattress From Earthfoam

by Chloe Gordon on 11/16/2022 | 3 Minute Read

If one piece of furniture is essential to living a productive and happy life, without a doubt, it's your mattress. Hopefully, you're spending at least seven hours a day getting some shuteye—more if you're lucky. 

While a mattress is crucial to living a rich, well-rested life, it's also a piece of furniture that can be toxic to the environment. And if the synthetic fibers, foam, and potentially carcinogenic chemicals used are harmful to the earth, there's no way it's healthy to spend a big chunk of your life on them. 

Editorial photograph

Earthfoam is a new mattress brand founded by the owners of a separate mattress company called Sleep On Latex. The brand creates mattresses from farmed trees without using herbicides, pesticides, GMOs, or synthetic fertilizers. Because Earthfoam, as well as its wool and cotton, are all certified organic, the mattress is organic, too. 

"We source our liquid natural rubber from a network of independent farmers in Sri Lanka. Specifically, natural rubber is collected from rubber trees, similar to how maple syrup gets tapped with a process that doesn’t harm the trees. The natural rubber then gets processed into foam at our own Earthfoam factory located nearby, which ensures its quality," mentioned Karl Shevick, founder and CEO of Earthfoam.

Editorial photograph

And because the brand is so focused on being both sustainable and organic, it only makes sense that Earthfoam is the first mattress brand to package its products in paper instead of plastic. Once wrapped, the mattress goes inside a cardboard box for a more environmentally friendly shipping process that’s both reliable and durable. 

“Earthfoam's mattresses are wrapped in heavy Kraft paper. We use a machine from a company called C3that specializes in this type of packaging. The mattress first gets fed into a machine where it is rolled up and wrapped in paper,” Shevick stated, “As it is being wrapped, an adhesive gets applied to the paper, which prevents it from unrolling during transit. 

Editorial photograph

"Wrapping mattresses in just paper without the use of any plastic at all is quite tricky and something that took a while to figure out, Shevick added. "It was important for us to eliminate plastic wrap completely from our packaging, so we spent a lot of time working on this with C3 to achieve this goal."

"We are selling a sustainable product and want the packaging to reflect that. A lot of our product development process involved pushing the limits of what you can do with natural materials," states Michael Mitzman, creative director of Earthfoam. "It didn't feel right to wrap a mattress made of natural, organic materials in plastic. We wanted to push the limits of what we could do with packaging to reduce our reliance on plastic."

Editorial photograph

The branding system for the mattress company fuses rich organic details with dreamy, minimalistic features. "Earthfoam’s visual identity was originally inspired by retro Airfoam ads (the original foam rubber mattress) from the 1950s, which featured bright colors, space-age curves, bold lettering, and an old-school script logo," notes Mitzman. "Combining elements of Japanese minimalism with photography and illustration styles that border on surrealism, we created a dream world that lives within simple and clean compositions. Each one is meant to evoke that wondrous moment when you find yourself falling asleep."

Earthfoam is a brand whose messaging doesn't stop at the visuals. The entire branding system, from the logo to the paper-based packaging, shares an approachable, sustainable mentality, proving that a brand can be equally as stunning as it is exemplary for the environment. 

Editorial photograph
Editorial photograph