How does the most heavily advertised pillow stack up?
The Ubiquitous Ad
If you have been watching television – whether over the air, through cable, from a satellite, or on the Internet – whether news, weather, sports, local programming, or movies – chances are you have seen Mike Lindell telling us how good MyPillow is. No, this is not an actor. It is Mike himself, the inventor of MyPillow and the owner/CEO of the company, My Pillow, Inc.
A Dream to Lay Your Head on
On the MyPillow website, Mike has a story to tell, and it is quite a story. From getting fired as a young man and using his last check to buy a pillow that fell flat, to running his own businesses, to dreaming about a pillow, to developing a pillow with a nation-wide following.
Mike dreamed about a pillow after years of unsatisfactory pillows. He told the dream to his daughter, and she designed the logo. Then he spent months making and trying pillows until he had one he liked.
Marketing went from a kiosk in a local mall to booths at home & garden shows and craft shows. A human interest story in a local newspaper led to newspaper ads across the country. A guest appearance on a radio led to others, then TV infomercials and ads. In the process, MyPillow moved from local product to national brand, with a name known by most people.
More than Pillows
It began with a pillow, but MyPillow, Inc. now has a line of bedding products. Besides pillows, they sell bed linens, mattresses and a mattress topper, seat cushions, and pet beds.
The Pillow
MyPillow Bed Pillows
MyPillow is a bed pillow, actually three models of the original MyPillow: Classic, Premium, and Travel. Most of these are sold directly from MyPillow (online and by phone) and on Amazon, though some are sold through Target, Walmart, and others.
The key to the success of MyPillow is the filling, described as “our patented interlocking fill.” MyPillow uses a combination of three sizes of shredded pieces of polyurethane foam. The jagged edges of shredded foam interlock with each other to hold the pillow in the shape which the user has formed. This is the same principle at work in Snuggle-Pedic’s Ultra-Luxury Pillow and Total Body Pillow, except that the Snuggle-Pedic and several other highly-rated brands use shredded memory foam instead of polyurethane foam in their pillows.
Customers can select the loft of their MyPillow pillows by using a color-coded chart keyed to gender and T-shirt size. The colors are Yellow (Women, Small), White (Men Small, Both Medium, Women Large), Green (men Large, Both XL, Women XXL), and Blue (Men XXL, Both XXXL+).
The Cover
As to the covers, except for cotton on the Travel Pillow, little is said about the fabric other than being USA made.
The Mattresses
There are two mattresses made by MyPillow. The MyPillow Mattress is a memory foam mattress, featuring gel memory foam. The MyPillow Bed is a hybrid mattress with three kinds of foam above a pocket coil array. The MyPillow Mattress Topper has two foam layers and a cover with phase change materials.
Made in USA
MyPillow makes all its products in the United States.
Customer Ratings
Each of the three MyPillow bed pillows has thousands of reviews on Amazon, but decidedly fewer verified customer reviews (VCRs). Some of the non-VCR reviewers stated that they bought their pillows on the MyPillow website. The total number of VCRs for the pillows is 8.942, and the aggregate average rating is 3.55 Stars (71.06%).
By contrast, the mattresses and topper by MyPillow received very few reviews and ratings (62). Most of these (53) were for the topper. The MyPillow Mattress had only 6 reviews on Amazon. The MyPillow Bed is not listed on Amazon, but it is on QVC, the cable shopping channel, where it has 3 reviews. Not surprisingly with such a small sample and a different class of product, the aggregate rating is dramatically divergent from that of the pillows: 4.53 stars (90.65%).
Despite the great divergence, the mattress/topper ratings have only a miniscule effect on the overall ratings for MyPillow pillows and mattresses. With a total of 9,004 verified customer reviews, the composite aggregate rating is 3.56 stars (91.19%).
See also the MyPillow Classic Series pillow review.