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Sleep Number makes smart beds that adjust firmness and track your sleep, selling them mostly through its own stores and website.
Sleep Number is a mattress company, but not the kind you just flop onto and hope for the best. It sells "smart beds" — beds with air chambers inside instead of springs or foam. You lie down, and the bed quietly adjusts how firm or soft it is. It even tracks your sleep, your heart rate, and your breathing, then tells you in an app whether you slept well. Customers are mostly regular people buying a bed for their home, and they pay either upfront or through financing plans. The beds aren't cheap — often several thousand dollars — so the company sells them mainly through its own roughly 650 stores and its website rather than through big-box retailers.
Think of it as the iPhone of beds: a premium gadget that does things a plain mattress can't, which is exactly why it can charge more. The pitch is personal comfort, because two people sharing a bed rarely want the same firmness. That "dual adjustability" is the core hook. The company also makes money from accessories — pillows, sheets, adjustable bases — and from its newer "Climate360" bed that warms and cools each side. For years it grew steadily, but recent times have been rough: high interest rates and cautious shoppers have hit big-ticket furniture hard, and Sleep Number has posted falling sales, lost money, and cut costs. That's the main reason its market value has shrunk to around half a billion dollars.
The company started in 1987 as Select Comfort, selling air-chamber beds through mall kiosks, and renamed itself Sleep Number in 2017 after its signature feature. Its big edge is that it owns the whole experience — the stores, the brand, the technology, and the data from millions of sleepers. The downside is that it's a discretionary purchase: when money gets tight, people delay buying a new bed. In good years it used its cash to open stores, buy back stock, and pay down debt; lately the priority has shifted to protecting the balance sheet. So the whole story comes down to one question: can a premium, tech-heavy bed win back budget-conscious shoppers?
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026