Design Mobel had built its reputation on great design, excellent sleep comfort and health, and had strong environmental commitment with its ISO 14001 management system.

An analysis of the system indicated that by changing materials and going to a higher cavitation tooling it would be possible to both halve the weight and the unit price. The development team set about investigating a number of options to improve the sleep system. Many iterations were developed and put through Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to evaluate their performance and stress points. To prove efficacy of the sleep system, the team prepared single cavity prototype tooling and we worked with Doug Gaunt at Scion to test the cyclical performance over a 10 year equivalent performance. The new system outperformed the existing system with less creep and fatigue after the testing.

The proposed new material replaced the rubber vulcanisate-polypropylene blend with a superior polyester elastomer (Hytrel) from DuPont. This material was selected because of its performance characteristics and its environmental credentials. Dupont were able to provide an aggregated Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of

the product to enable a detailed environmental assessment. All parts were labelled with their ISO Class plastic code: TEEE (Polyester Elastomer) to ensure effective end of life identification.

The existing sleep system required each type of bed design to be stocked in both sleep systems. The new concept eliminated this by being able to unclip from the rail significantly reducing stock holding requirements.

From a sleep performance perspective, the new product enabled the uptake of ground breaking sleep research undertaken by Locus Research for Design Mobel and created a new three zone platform which more effectively catered for different somatatypes.