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There's never a wrong time to start getting better sleep, but since there's a huge Nectar Black Friday sale on now, it's officially the best time to upgrade your mattress. The brand is knocking up to 50 percent off mattresses, which makes the classic memory foam bed ($1,063; $349) that won me over up to $1,161 off, depending on the size. And trust me: It's worth it.
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TOTAL: 93/100
For background, the first time I ever saw a bed-in-a-box was thanks to Gretchen Geraghty. (She’s an Instagram influencer, for the uninitiated.) “Here’s my new mattress!” she declared on her IG story, pointing to an impressively small box sitting in the middle of her new apartment. “Yeah right, what’s the catch?” I thought as I watched her unroll the mattress and place it on her bed frame with ease in the subsequent slides.
Considering the only bed-in-a-box I’d ever slept on was an air mattress—never a good experience—I highly doubted that a quality mattress could come that way.
That is, until the hard, worn-out mattress in my childhood bedroom started giving me back pain every time I visited my parents. It needed to be replaced, and when Nectar generously offered to send me one of its bed-in-a-box style mattresses, I caved. Luckily, I was home for the holidays, so I got to experience the setup process in action.
When the mattress arrived, my dad and I hauled the compact box upstairs and into my room—no “pivoting” necessary. And the unboxing process was just as easy—after unrolling it onto the bed frame and cutting off the plastic casing, my newly-upgraded bed was ready for a test drive.
After a few nights of sleeping on the soft-yet-supportive layers of memory foam, I was impressed. My middle back pain was gone, and I noticed that I fell asleep in a few minutes instead of tossing and turning. In other words, this side sleeper was content.
However, the true test came a few months later, when I moved home to quarantine with my family. At the time, I slept on my Nectar mattress almost every night and honestly, it was probably the best part of living at home (minus the home-cooked meals, of course).
First of all, the mattress’s five layers are designed to relieve common pressure points for a difference I can actually feel when I lay down after a long day. Plus, its gel memory foam ensures that body heat is evenly distributed, which is a total game-changer for hot sleepers like me. Those factors, combined with its medium firmness, ensure that I sleep straight through the night and wake up feeling like I just got 10-plus hours in a luxe hotel bed.
My only complaint is that it comes encased in a ton of plastic, which doesn’t feel eco-friendly. But plastic is the reason Nectar is able to package the mattress so compactly, so it seems kind of unavoidable when it comes to the whole bed-in-a-box thing.
Other than that, I’m a total bed-in-a-box convert. And between Nectar’s free shipping and returns, 365-night home trial period and current Black Friday sale, which includes up to a 50 percent markdown on the mattress of your choice, there’s never been a better time to see what all the hype is about.
