Mattress Manufacturing: Hand Tufting to ABB Robots

Mattress manufacturing mixes heavy industry with needlework. Steel wire is coiled into springs at high speed and foam arrives in large blocks, yet much of the final product is still put together by people with sewing machines and staple guns. This post looks at how mattresses were made by hand and how spring machines and foam changed the trade. It then visits a big new plant in Korea that chose hand work, and looks at where robots, including ABB arms for foam handling and palletizing, already do the heaviest jobs in other factories.

Foam rolls and packed mattresses on the floor of the Joy Sleep mattress factory in Andhra Pradesh, India, 2015. Photo: Vmakumar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From wool carders to coil springs

For centuries a mattress was a cloth bag filled with whatever was at hand: straw, feathers, horsehair, wool or cotton. Making and remaking them was a trade of its own. In Paris, women known as matelassières still set up on the banks of the Seine in the 1920s, carding old wool by hand and restuffing their customers' mattresses on the spot. The maker then tufted the mattress, pushing a long needle through it and tying the filling down at regular points so it would not shift into lumps. Home production lasted a long time too: around 1940, a US government program taught farm women to sew their own cotton mattresses as a way to use up surplus cotton.

Matelassieres carding mattress wool on the banks of the Seine in Paris, 1920s postcard. Photo: Patras / Paris Musees via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Springs gave mattresses a new core. Coil springs spread through upholstery and bedding during the nineteenth century, and in 1899 James Marshall introduced the first mattress with individually wrapped pocketed coils, still often called Marshall coils. Each spring sat in its own fabric pocket and could move without dragging its neighbors. Assembling spring units stayed slow manual work for a long time. In 1917 the photographer Lewis Hine documented boys of 14 and 15 linking bed springs by hand for the National Child Labor Committee.

Boys aged 14 and 15 linking bed springs by hand, photographed by Lewis Hine in 1917. Photo: Lewis Hine / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Spring making was the first part of the job to be mechanized. Coiling, pocketing and gluing springs into strings and units moved onto dedicated machines that need only a few operators. Foam came later. Latex foam spread in Europe during the twentieth century, and in 1992 Tempur-Pedic brought an all-foam mattress to the United States. With foam, factories started cutting large blocks into layers and gluing those layers together. The cover, the border and the final closing stayed with people at sewing machines.

Two layers of pocket springs inside an opened mattress, each coil in its own fabric pocket. Photo: Tim Deegan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Why one plant still sews by hand

On September 9 Sealy Korea held the opening ceremony for a new plant in Yeoju, the largest Sealy factory in Asia, and it runs mostly on hand work. The Seoul Economic Daily described more than a dozen skilled workers at each stage: cutting fabric, quilting, sewing, joining covers to springs with staple guns and inspecting. Its 92 production workers can make up to 500 mattresses in an eight-hour shift. General manager Jung Kyu-tae said automation makes it hard to react at once when the stitch count is uneven. The plant also builds every mattress to order within five days.

Workers tufting a cotton mattress by hand in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, 2026. Photo: Janak Bhatta / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Other makers have put robots on the heavy, repetitive steps around the sewing. A Dreamwell patent, filed in 2016 and granted in 2018, describes a line that applies adhesive to an innerspring unit, compresses and stretches a foam layer to size, and then uses a robotic lifting assembly to place the layer precisely on top. The patent names ABB as a commercial source of an industrial robot for that pick and place job. A large arm such as the ABB IRB 6700 could carry a vacuum gripper for wide foam sheets, and cells like this are normally planned in RobotStudio before they are installed.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large flat panel at dhp technology, the kind of load a foam layer robot handles. Photo: ABB

Packing has changed the most in the last fifteen years. Online brands ship mattresses rolled tight in a box, and Wikipedia counts more than 175 bed-in-a-box companies in the United States. Roll-packing machines compress the mattress, fold it and roll it into film. Elektroteks of Turkey sells a robot cell called RoBOX that forms boxes, inserts rolled mattresses and moves the boxes onto pallets, and Atlanta Attachment Co. of Georgia sells an automatic mattress stacker for loading pallets. That last step is ordinary work for ABB palletizers such as the IRB 460 and IRB 660, robots we also wrote about in our post on truck unloading and palletizing.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking boxed products onto pallets. Photo: ABB

What mattress factories automate next

The suppliers are getting bigger. In August, Leggett & Platt shareholders approved a merger with Somnigroup, the owner of the Tempur Sealy brands, putting one of the largest spring makers and one of the largest bed makers under one roof. Larger groups tend to invest in automated lines for springs, foam lamination and packing. Collaborative robots like the ABB GoFa CRB 15000 are a possible fit where people and machines share a table, for example holding a heavy cover in place while an operator sews, or checking labels at inspection.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 collaborative robot at a work table. Photo: ABB

For home buyers, two trends run side by side. Boxed mattresses keep shrinking: Dolphin Pack showed a double roll system in 2021 that fits a mattress into a box of about 0.12 cubic meters. Build to order is growing too, the model Sealy Korea uses, where each mattress is made after someone buys it. Robots handle high volume packing well. Short runs of custom sizes and firmness levels still favor skilled people, or very flexible cells with quick changeovers and simple programming.

Big John's Mattress Factory, a small local mattress maker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Soft materials remain the hardest part to automate. Fabric stretches, foam sags, and a mattress border has to be sewn around each corner while the whole mattress is turned. Robots also cost money and need trained technicians, which weighs on the many small regional mattress makers. Safety is the easier problem, since palletizers and foam handlers can work behind guarding or inside ABB SafeMove zones that keep people out of reach. For the stitching itself, the Yeoju plant is a reminder that a large maker can still decide people do it better.

A mattress maker with his hand-stuffed mattresses in the medina of Meknes, Morocco, 2010. Photo: Adam Jones / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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