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Tempur Pedic Pillow A long plane trip for an important business conference. A cross-state car drive to visit the folks. Or even annoying traffic jams, where you can’t even pass away with a few minutes of decent sleep because car manufacturers seem bent on making their seats as hard and uncomfortable as possible. It’s virtually impossible to avoid the necessities and inconveniences of travel, but there are ways of making it more bearable. Or in some cases, actually refreshing.
The Tempur Pedic Travel Pillow takes all the benefits of a memory foam mattress and reshape it into a compact, convenient size that’s perfect for bringing on a trip. A Tempur Pedic Pillow It makes a good gift for the busy boss whose frequent flights have made him on first-name basis with the airline staff, for working parents who never have enough sleep and desperately need and deserve a chance to snooze wherever they can, or any family that loves a weekend road trip (or needs to be convinced to drive to the grandparents more often—hint, hint). The Tempur Pedic Travel Pillow is also a handy investment you can make for yourself. You have probably said, on many occasions, that you’d give anything to be able to relax a little more, sleep a little better, and escape for a few minutes from the ball of stress you call your life. The Tempur Pedic Travel Pillow might be just the thing you need.
Why should I get the Temper Pedic travel pillow? The difference lies in the material in the Tempur Pedic Pillow: memory foam, touted as the greatest technological breakthrough in the great human quest for a good night’s sleep. Developed by NASA to cushion astronauts from g-force pressure experienced during space travel, it was adapted for medical and commercial use as the “wonder mattress”. They reasoned (quite correctly) that a material that could protect astronauts from the bumps and bruises of space travel would probably reduce the pressure sores and muscle pains.
The first to embrace the NASA technology was the medical company, Tempur Pedic, who developed mattresses for use in hospitals and nursing homes whose bedridden patients often experienced bedsores from long hours of lying down on hard mattresses. Memory foam was designed to conform to the body’s shape: unlike traditional coil or latex mattresses, which sprung back to its original positions because of air pressure, it was composed of open-cell molecules that evenly distributed air and thus retained (or “remembered”) the body’s contour. Memory foam material was also temperature-sensitive. Body heat slightly “melted” the material, making it more malleable and sensitive to the body’s shape. But once the body heat was removed, the memory foam would harden and spring back to its original form.
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Tempur Pedic also refined NASA’s technology. Because memory foam was so malleable, one of the biggest concerns its users had was its durability. Tempur Foam was stronger and lasted longer. And being a medical company that catered primarily to hospitals and nursing homes, one of the most important innovations in Tempur Foam was its breathability and how it felt against the skin. Bedridden patients often experience bedsores, muscle pain, and discomfort from the heat and moisture accumulated while lying down. Tempur Pedic adjusted the material accordingly, and thus hit in a product that appealed beyond the health care industry. Tempur Pedic expanded its sales to the consumer market, developed the Swedish Sleep System and recently, the Tempur Travel Pillow. Why is Tempur Pedic more expensive? It’s true: there are cheaper versions of memory foam products, developed by other companies that saw the success of Tempur Foam and followed suit. Part of it is that Tempur Pedic is a medical firm, and its competitors are consumer manufacturers with a much lower cost structure.
Some would argue, though, that the fact that Tempur Pedic is a medical firm gives its products a reliability that may be worth the additional cost. It has much more to lose if their reputation is marred by producing something cheap and substandard, and—being used to creating something that endures the wear and tear of industrial use—the materials will always be top-of-the-line. And it is really materials that make memory foam effective: density, hardness or softness, response to temperature, and also durability.
Tempur Pedic enthusiasts point to the kind of memory foam it uses, versus those in other “viscoelastic” (that’s technology-speak for memory foam) mattresses and pillows. Put both under a microscope, and Tempur Travel pillows are extremely dense: there are more cells per square meter, and the cells themselves are dense and consistently shaped. This means it works better, and it lasts longer.
It would be possible to buy a bargain product, and certainly Tempur Pedic is not the only brand that can claim to provide quality, but consumers should beware of bargain memory foam pillows that use fillers just to create thick pillow at a lower rate. |
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