Finally, an Adjustable Pillow That Isn't Foam

Buying a pillow is a guess. You can't test eight hours of sleep in a store aisle, so you pick a firmness off a label, sleep on it for a month, and find out the truth the slow way. The industry's answer to this has mostly been to sell you another pillow. There's a better answer, and it's a zipper.

Why fixed loft fails most people

Loft is the height your head rests at, and the right loft depends on stuff no manufacturer can know: your shoulder width, how firm your mattress is, whether you sleep on your side, your back, or facedown, and whether that changes at 3 a.m. A broad shouldered side sleeper on a firm mattress might need five inches. A stomach sleeper might need two. One fixed pillow can't be both. That's why the average closet has a graveyard of almost right pillows in it.

What adjustable actually means

An adjustable pillow ships overfilled, with a zipper that gives you access to the fill. You take some out, sleep on it, adjust again. Two or three nights of this and your neck stops arguing with your pillow. The removed fill goes in a bag in the closet, and when the pillow softens after years of use, you put some back in.

Simple idea. The real question is what's inside the zipper, and that's where most adjustable pillows go wrong.

The fill is the whole product

Nearly every adjustable pillow on the market is stuffed with shredded polyurethane foam, sometimes blended with a little fiber so the label sounds nicer. Foam is cheap and springy, but it's a petroleum product, it holds heat, and digging through a pile of shredded foam to adjust your loft feels like unpacking a shipping box.

We fill ours with wild harvested kapok instead. Kapok is a hollow plant fiber from rainforest trees, light as down, naturally resistant to moisture and the dust mites that follow it. Adjusting it feels like handling raw silk. It breathes instead of storing your body heat, and when it eventually relaxes, a bag of fresh kapok brings it back. If kapok is new to you, here's the full story on the fiber.

How to dial in your loft

Start overfilled and pull fill out a handful at a time over three or four nights. Side sleepers usually settle highest, back sleepers in the middle, stomach sleepers lowest. The signal you're looking for is nothing: no craned neck in the morning, no folding the pillow in half, no stacking a second one underneath. When you stop noticing your pillow, it's right.

The MAREA pillow comes in standard, queen, and king, each with a GOTS certified organic cotton sateen cover and a hidden zipper. Side sleepers who want full length support should look at the body pillow. Either way, you finish tuning it yourself, which is the only way a pillow was ever going to fit you.

Keep reading

Curious what kapok actually is? Start with the fiber. Or read the story behind MAREA.