Today, Glendale, Arizona-based 3Z Brands — which owns brands Bear, Birch, Brooklyn Bedding, Helix, Leesa, Southerland and Nolah — is a bedding behemoth, and one of the sleep industry’s most vertically integrated manufacturers.
But few know the story of its founder, John Merwin, who, once upon a time, dropped out of college to help his brother, Rob, sell mattresses out of an old Wonder Bread truck.
The year is 1995. Rob Merwin originally started the businesses by buying scratched and dented furniture and mattresses from an auctioneer, and selling them out of his garage through ads he placed in the Penny Saver and the local newspaper.
The auctioneer, who took a liking to him, told him to focus on mattresses, so he pivoted. It was then that he called his brother, John, who was newly engaged and attending Montana State University-Billings, to come help him with the business.
“He said, ‘After you get married, why don’t you and your wife move down to Arizona?’” John recalls.
So, he did. John joined his brother’s mattress liquidation business in Phoenix. It was so successful, it rapidly grew from a mobile-based mattress-selling company out of a refurbished truck to brick-and-mortar locations.
“For the longest time, we were retailers,” John says. “We started in retail, and we were liquidators. We would buy from wherever we could find a discounted product. We went straight to Sealy Simmons and started buying from the actual manufacturers.”
Pretty soon, though, they would make another pivot. John admits that when he received calls to buy extraneous products, he probably could have negotiated the deals over the phone or via email, but he always preferred visiting factories and seeing how things were made, as well as learning about the equipment. He said that soon, he was spending a lot of time touring factories, including facilities overseas.
“That was when the idea came that, ‘Hey, there might be an opportunity if we could figure out how to make mattresses,’” he says. “Everything was being done under one umbrella, one roof. Then I would come back to the States, and it would be like, ‘Well, you have to go buy your coils from this company. Then you have to buy foam from this company.’ That’s when I said, I don’t understand that. Why can’t everything just be done under one roof? And so that’s what drove us. We wanted to do it ourselves. We want to be as vertical as we can.”
In 2008, John learned about bed-in-a-box technology while in China, when he watched three men hand-roll a flattened mattress. This began his obsessive desire to put everything in a box. To help achieve this dream, he invested $135,000 into a roll-packing machine from Italy.
In 2010, at John’s wife’s insistence that he try selling mattresses on Amazon, he made his first bed-in-a-box sale, which he did under the name Brooklyn Bedding (named after his daughter, not the New York City borough).
According to John, that was how the company started to gain momentum. After it was earning stellar reviews post-sales, Amazon’s marketing department called and asked to feature him in an ad on its homepage.
“Over the course of nine months, every Tuesday, our ad would be featured on the homepage of Amazon.com,” Merwin recalls. “Obviously, those nine months were chaotic, and we were developing new beds and just kept selling more and more on Amazon. That’s how we got our start online and really started to grow our brand.”
Thanks to the runaway success, John began selling direct to consumers on BrooklynBedding.com in 2012.
In October 2021, Brooklyn Bedding merged with Helix Sleep under the ownership of Cerberus Capital Management. In 2022, the entity was renamed 3Z Brands, a nod to “zzz,” the colloquial reference to snoring.
Fast forward to today, and 3Z Brands has just under a million square feet of manufacturing facilities, including a recent 250,000-square-foot addition to support the company’s foam-pouring operations.
“I like to say when I give people a tour of our Glendale facility, it’s an accumulation of all the years of experience and visiting all these different manufacturers and knowing what I thought were best practices and applying it to the way we built this,” John says.
“We do all of our own cutting,” he adds. “We spin our own coils. We pour and fabricate all of our foam under one roof and build everything to be as vertical as we can under one roof in Glendale.”
3Z brands has also made several acquisitions over the past several years. In 2022 and 2023, the company acquired brands Bear Mattress, Nolah and Leesa. In December 2024, 3Z Brands acquired Southerland Inc., which expanded its manufacturing footprint to additional factories in Oklahoma City, Nashville and Phoenix, and strengthened its wholesale capabilities.
In January 2026, 3Z Brands announced its Helix mattresses were available in select Mattress Warehouse locations nationwide. It also launched a new nationwide retail program for its Brooklyn Bedding offerings, designed to draw traffic to retail partners.
According to a news release from 3Z Brands, Brooklyn Bedding’s retail program, like the Helix program, is built to drive traffic into retail stores. The program supports large-scale partners with advantages that strengthen in-store performance, including domestic mattress assembly, in-house production of proprietary foams and coils, and a nationwide manufacturing network.
Today, 3Z Brands employs more than 1,400 people. Looking to the future, John says the goal is: “continuing to get our products out to as many people as possible and continuing to grow our brand.
“On the product side, we’re trying to build different things and looking at different technologies to innovate and create new products,” he continues. “Ultimately, it’s putting out great products, great prices, great value and great results.”
