How Tuft & Needle Disrupted a Tired Mattress Marketplace With word-of-mouth marketing and a focus on customer service, two friends are becoming the sleeper hit of the mattress industry.

It's one thing to stand in a grocery store aisle choosing from dozens of cereal or shampoo brands, but standing amid a sea of mattresses, trying to distinguish one from another, is a different proposition altogether.

In 2011, newlywed John-Thomas ("JT") Marino ran headfirst into the mattress-buying morass. An engineer at a Silicon Valley startup, Marino took an analytical approach, intending to dissect the process of making his purchase before ever entering a mattress store. Things didn't go well.

"I started doing research online, and that is when the challenge began for me," he remembers. "Almost everything was marketing spin or just false. I couldn't feel confident in what I was researching."