Anthony, Founder of MAREA Sleep

Anthony is the founder of MAREA Sleep and writes everything in The Sleep Journal.

He grew up playing whatever sport his parents would drive him to, and these days it is surfing, freediving, jiu jitsu, and finding the next boat to get on. Over the last five years he has slept in hundreds of beds across Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Central America and South America, plus hostel bunks, the deck of a dive boat, and more airport floors than he would like to admit. MAREA is designed in Hawaii.

MAREA started in a small boutique hotel in Bali, Indonesia, where he slept on a kapok pillow for the first time and could not believe he had never heard of it. A home goods shop on the island explained where the fiber came from. He flew home to a pillow that was half polyester, the rest conventional cotton. He had already swapped the nonstick pans, the water filter and the sheets; the pillow was the last holdout, and once he worked out that a third of a life adds up to something like twenty six years with your face on the same object, it stopped being a small question.

He is a side sleeper. That matters more than it sounds, because side sleeping opens a wider gap between your head and the mattress than any other position, and almost nothing on the market is built to fill it properly. That problem is why MAREA pillows open at the end and let you set your own loft, and why he is unusually interested in what a pillow is actually made of.

He is not a doctor, a physical therapist, or a sleep scientist, and does not write as one. What he can tell you is what is inside a MAREA pillow, where it came from, and how to adjust it.

Written by Anthony

• The Pillow Problem Nobody Explains to Side Sleepers
• Kapok vs Memory Foam: What You're Actually Choosing Between
• What Is Kapok? The Rainforest Fiber That Sleeps Like Down
• Finally, an Adjustable Pillow That Isn't Foam
• Why I Built MAREA

More in The Sleep Journal, or read the longer version of the story on Our Story.