Is The Emma Mattress Worth Buying? + UK Discount Codes 2024

The Emma Mattress is one of the trendy new mattresses which appeared on the market in the last few years. It’s won more awards than I’ve had hot dinners (well, nearly) and gets strong customer reviews. 

Here’s our review of The Emma Mattress including how it compares to similarly priced rivals, what we think of its specification and where you can find discount codes.

You’ll also find the Emma Mattress referred to as the Emma Original.

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Pros and cons of the Emma Mattress

What reviews do customers give The Emma Mattress?

On Emma’s own website, The Emma Mattress was scoring a very impressive 4.7/5 when I checked, but I think it’s also worth looking at some third party scores. As of 2023, the Emma Mattress is scoring:
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• an impressive 4.7/5 on Google reviews from 400+ reviews and 3.9/5 on TrustPilot from 24000+ reviews. This is for the entire Emma brand, so also includes some other stuff they sell as well as things like deliveries, customer service etc
• 4.4/5 on Amazon.co.uk from 1500+ reviews and 4.2/5 on John Lewis & Partners from 200+ reviews
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In case you are curious, we looked at the TrustPilot ‘TrustScore’ for every major mattress brand we could find which sells in the UK. We searched in 2023 and compiled this graph:

A few important caveats to this barrage of numbers:

1. The score is for a whole brand rather than an individual mattress. A company like Silentnight has dozens of products, including bedding, mattresses and pillows whilst a brand such as Emma has a relatively small range. 
2. If two brands scored the same overall, we put them alphabetically
3. There’s a big variation in how many reviews we could find for each company, but we ignored a few which just had a handful of ratings.
4. Some mattress brands, such as Rest Assured don’t seem to be on TrustPilot so we couldn’t include them.

To give you a flavour of the reviews on TrustPilot, we’ve picked out one positive review and one negative reviews. We like to focus on reviews which are about the mattress rather than the buying process or whether the delivery driver had a nice smile. We also look for reviews from people who have had several months to try it out rather than a couple of nights. 

Keep in mind that the overall score for Emma is very positive, so there are many more five star reviews than one star reviews.

What type of mattress is The Emma Mattress?

The Emma Mattress is a foam mattress which also goes by the name of The Emma Original. It’s got a layer of memory foam which is sandwiched into the middle of two other layers of foam and it costs £474 for a double mattress at the time of writing.

Memory foam has a lot going for it and it’s performed well in a number of studies under laboratory conditions and in real world tests. For example, Gunningberg, Lindholm et al compared visco-elastic foam (another name for memory foam) with ‘standard hospital mattresses’ to see if they would help with pressure sores for patients recovering from hip operations. The result was that ‘patients on standard mattresses tended to develop more severe pressure ulcers’ suggesting that the memory foam did a better job of spreading out pressure across the body (see more details of the study from 2013).

The downsides of a memory foam mattress

Of course, there are negatives attached to memory foam mattresses as well. For example, some academics have studied the environmental impact of incinerating memory foam mattresses once they are finished with. Garrido, Font and Conesa studied this in 2017 and recorded ‘relatively high emissions’ of Nitric Oxide, Ammonia and Hydrogen Cyanide. They concluded that ‘their reduction must be considered’.

The Emma Mattress arrives squashed up into a box, hence the phrase ‘bed in a box’ that you may have seen. It slowly expands when you open it. The idea is that you can get it up the stairs without tripping over the cat and they can deliver it more easily and cut down on storage costs.

A clever design to keep you cool

You may be wondering why the memory foam layer is sandwiched into the middle of the Emma Mattress rather than being put at the top of the mattress. Equally, you may have absolutely no interest in this and would much rather be watching TV. Either way, I won’t judge you.

​The gist of it is that lots of people find memory foam offers a consistent level of support but a) they don’t like the quicksand-esque sinking feeling and b) it makes them feel a little bit hot in bed (oooer missus). 

By putting a breathable layer of foam on top of the memory foam (‘Patented Airgocell foam’ in the case of the Emma Mattress) the idea is that you can have your cake and eat it – lovely memory foam cushioned support but without feeling like you are being dragged into quicksand.

The remarkable rise of the Emma Mattress

This is a good moment to mention the way in which the Emma Mattress and some of its rivals have offered a ‘disruptive’ alternative to the traditional way of buying a mattress in the last decade.

The graph below is remarkable and will hopefully be of interest, even if you don’t love graphs as much as me.

The blue line shows us how many people have searched for the term ‘silentnight mattress’ between 2004 and today. I’ve picked out Silentnight as it is considered the UK’s biggest mattress brand. The red line shows relative interest in the search term ’emma mattress’. As you’ll see, people started searching for the ’emma mattress’ in 2017 and the numbers have kept rising since. Silentnight has stayed relatively steady.

Emma isn’t alone in this – it is a similar story for Simba Sleep and some other ‘bed in a box’ brands. Several arrived around the same time, offering an alternative to the familiar mid-priced pocket spring brands. These new brands offered longer warranties, home trial periods, big marketing campaigns, less choice and more foam than traditional mattresses.

How firm is The Emma Mattress?

According to the official website, the ‘Emma Mattress has a medium firmness’.

Firmness is a funny thing in the mattress market because there isn’t a consistent way of measuring it that every manufacturer uses. I’ve seen some clever technical ratings, but unless everyone uses the same scale, it isn’t much use because one company’s idea of a ‘firm’ mattress will be different to another’s.

Equally, you will find differing opinions from reviewers on how firm a mattress is. The best you can do is look at lots of different opinions and then try out the mattress.

The Emma Mattress is also described as ‘medium tension’ on the John Lewis & Partners website (incidentally, medium tension is also how I’d describe a day out with my children). Most other reviewers say that the Emma Mattress is somewhere around medium or perhaps medium/firm. 

The importance of getting the right mattress firmness level

In case you aren’t yet bored of my waffle, I’ll explain a little bit about the importance of choosing a mattress with the right firmness for you.

The general idea is that a mattress should give you the right level of support based on your weight and build so that your spine is correctly aligned whilst you sleep. A very heavy person will sink into a very soft mattress too much and end up with a wonky spine. Equally, a four foot tall jockey won’t sink into a very firm mattress enough. 

What position do you sleep in?

Another spanner to throw into the works is that the way you sleep also affects the firmness of the mattress that you need. Side sleepers put a bit more pressure on their shoulders and hips, so they usually lean towards a softer mattress than someone who sleeps on their back or front.

So, you need to find a mattress which gives you the right level of support. If you’ve heard people say things like “a firm mattress is good for your back” then you are best to ignore it. Proper experts like the Sleep Council say that you need to find a mattress which is supportive for you (‘Your mattress should be firm enough to support your spine in the correct alignment while conforming to your body’s contours’). 

Incidentally, if you are dealing with a bad back then I feel obliged to suggest that you seek out personal and professional advice – I’m just sharing the gist of general advice from experts online.

A few manufacturers give suggestions of what weight their mattresses are ideal for, but not many. For what it’s worth, John Lewis & Partners say that you need a soft mattress if you weigh up to 8 stone, medium for 8 to 16 stone or firm for 16 stone+. However, we can’t apply this rigidly to every mattress company so you are best to either try out a few mattresses in a store, or buy one online which comes with a free trial (more on that later…)

Which awards has The Emma Mattress won?

As I said earlier, The Emma Mattress/The Emma Original has won lots of awards from expert reviewers and other websites.

According to the Emma website, ‘Our Emma Original is the UK’s No. 1 most-awarded mattress in 2019’ with awards from mattress testing websites including Which?, The Independent, Real Homes, Good Housekeeping, T3 and Ideal Home.

Some of the things that the judges said included:

• Good Housekeeping said that their tested felt ‘supported and rejuvenated’ thanks to ‘The layer designed to provide perfect pressure distribution’. They also praised how it dealt with heat and said that ‘The climate control fibres solved one of our testers previous concerns about overheating’ 
• Real Homes gave it the Emma Mattress a five star rating and said that it deals well with the issues of heat (‘Air flow and temperature control is at the heart of Emma’s construction, with every layer featuring some natty way to stop you sweating to death every night’.)
• T3 also gave the Emma Mattress five stars. They said that it’s ‘the best mattress you can buy right now’. Their reasons are that it is ‘unbelievably comfortable’ and is able to provide ‘fantastic support no matter what position you sleep in’.

What guarantee and home trial period does The Emma Mattress offer?

The Emma Mattress is one of several ‘bed in a box’ mattresses which comes with a trial period, although Emma’s is better than most as it now has a 200 night ‘risk free trial’. There’s some variation in the way these things work, but the Emma Mattress one is a simple one.

You pay upfront for the mattress and then can contact them to get your money back if you don’t like it. They pay the returns postage cost. Some other similar mattresses will only swap your mattress for another one they sell, which does limit you a bit. 

As well as the 200 night trial, Emma also say that ‘you can try the Emma Mattress for a couple of days and if you feel like it is too soft or too hard, we can send you a free of charge comfort layer, either soft or firm, to adjust the mattress to your preferences’.

The Emma Mattress warranty

Meanwhile, the Emma Mattress comes with a 10 year guarantee. At the time of writing, the warranty covers ‘cracks, dents or other damages to the foam that have occurred despite proper use and handling of the mattress.’

Please do take a few minutes to check over the terms of the guarantee and the risk free trial. To be fair, there isn’t a lot of smallprint with the Emma Mattress, but these things do get updated occasionally. 

For the purposes of comparison, we looked at the warranty length of every double size pocket spring mattress for sale at Mattress Online which cost between £600 and £700 (roughly the price of The Emma Mattress). As the chart below shows, of the 21 mattresses only three offered a 10 warranty which matches the length of the Emma Mattress. The majority offered a warranty which is half the length. This should be seen as a positive endorsement for the Emma Mattress – although as we’ll explore later in this guide, it is less outstanding when we compare The Emma Mattress to rival foam mattresses. Our data is from 2023.

Where can I buy The Emma Mattress?

Like most ‘bed in a box’ mattresses, the Emma Mattress is mostly sold direct from the manufacturer but you can also get the Emma Mattress from a couple of other big outlets. Prices do vary a bit, so I would check them all to see which is the best deal. 

John Lewis & Partners and Amazon.co.uk both sell The Emma Mattress and according to the blurb, you still get the 200 night trial period. 

When we checked, the mattress was the same price on all three sites. That probably won’t always be the case.

Where can I get a discount code for The Emma Mattress?

The first place to look for discount codes on The Emma Mattress is on the Emma website itself. 

Any others we get hold will appear at the top of this page. 

Honestly, you’ll be first to know.

We looked up some price tracking data on the Emma Mattress from an excellent website called CamelCamelCamel which tracks Amazon prices. As the graph below shows, the price of the double Emma Mattress has fluctuated over time due to factors such as material costs, special offers and discounts. It might be worth holding off until a sale if you aren’t in a hurry for a new mattress.

Will they take away my old mattress if I buy The Emma Mattress?

Yes, they will take away your old mattress if you buy an Emma Mattress. Curiously, not every mattress company offers this so you are sometimes left to fend for yourself.

There are a couple of things you need to be aware of though. Firstly, you pay extra for a mattress collection (£35 at the time of writing). Secondly, you might want to bear in mind that if you send back The Emma Mattress under the 200 night trial offer then you’ll be left without a mattress. I’m sure you’d thought of that already, but I just didn’t want you to end up sleeping on the floor. You’re welcome.

What are the alternatives to The Emma Mattress?

The Emma brand also make a similar mattress to The Emma Mattress/The Emma Original called The Emma Hybrid/Emma Premium. The main difference is that it has an extra layer of small pocket springs, which is what most of us have in our mattresses. When I last checked, it was £713 for a double.

In 2021, Emma release a more expensive model called the Emma Original Hybrid (£959 for a double). The most notable difference with this one is that it uses full size pocket springs rather than mini springs. As a result, a lot of the support comes from the springs rather than the foam. The springs are ‘zoned’ which is a mattress manufacturing technique which aims to offer varying degrees of support so it fit around the curves of your body. Whether or not you feel that your body has curves is another matter…

Having a small range is a common choice by modern mattress companies with slick names and slicker websites. They seem to have twigged that customers can get a little baffled by a choice of 94 similar white rectangles in a showroom.

Some other award-winning foam mattresses which are alternatives to The Emma Mattress include:

The Nectar Sleep Mattress

• The Nectar Sleep (£1199) beats the Emma Mattress on a couple of key features. Firstly, the trial period lasts for a whole year meaning that you can it out in all weathers – although Emma’s 200 night trial is not exactly small. Secondly, the Nectar Sleep shines through with its ‘forever’ warranty. You may feel that the 10 years offered by Emma is adequate and it’s certainly better than you get with many similarly priced pocket sprung mattresses. It’s classed as a medium/firm mattress whereas the Emma mattress is classed as medium. In our side by side comparison, the Nectar Sleep brand scores slightly lower on TrustPilot than Emma with a score of 4.2/5.

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Studio by Silentnight

Studio by Silentnight (£374) is an attempt by the UK’s biggest mattress maker to offer something similar to bed in a box mattresses such as the Emma Mattress. However, whilst you get the credibility of the Silentnight brand you get a less generous trial period which is 60 nights and only offers a swap rather than a refund. It also has a warranty length which is half that of the Studio by Silentnight. The Silentnight brand scores 4.1/5 on TrustPilot.

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Eve Sleep Original

Eve Sleep Original (£699) – the Eve Sleep now comes with a one year trial, which beats Emma’s 200 night trial period. There’s not much between the Emma and Eve brands on customer ratings and they have the same warranty length but the Eve Sleep Original is graded as medium/firm whilst the Emma Mattress is graded as medium. When we compared measurements, the Emma Mattress was offering an extra centimetre as it’s 25cm rather than Eve Sleep Original’s 24cm. Honestly though, I wouldn’t give that any consideration when making your decision. Anywhere around the mid-twenties will do the job nicely.

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Facts and figures – how does the Emma Mattress compare to its rivals?

There are thousands of mattresses on the UK market but it’s relatively easy to pick out the rivals to the Emma Mattress. These mattresses all have some key attributes in common – they arrive compacted in a box, they offer a home trial period and a long warranty and they are somewhere around £500 – £1000. Most of them also offer decent discounts from time to time, so you may be able to save yourself a considerable amount off the price listed below.

As the data shows, The Emma Mattress is one of the cheapest when we compare standard prices of its rivals. At the time of writing, the Studio by Silentnight is lower priced for a double mattress but the rest are more expensive.

A limited range of mattress sizes

The choice of sizes with The Emma Mattress doesn’t match up to ​​The Simba Hybrid, the REM-Fit 400 ​or the OTTY Hybrid Mattress but the vast majority of British mattress shoppers are looking for one of the standard sizes. 

The Emma Mattress also outperforms several of its rivals with its 200 night trial period. Only Nectar Sleep and ​​The Simba Hybrid Original come with equal or better. However, the warranty length is comfortably beaten by Nectar Sleep and REM-Fit 400.

The Emma Mattress comes in a firmness level which will suit many people, but it won’t be right for everyone

Our mattress comparison chart

Review scores and prices are correct at the time of writing (2023).

Warranty length – how does Emma compare to Simba, Eve, Nectar and others?

It’s a solid mid-table position for Emma in our chart showing the comparative warranty lengths of popular bed in a box mattress brands.

There are some caveats to this. Nectar Sleep’s ‘forever’ warranty wouldn’t fit on our graph, so we recorded it at 25 years. Silentnight’s rating refers to their Studio model whilst Slumberland’s rating is for their Rollo model.

Several mattress brands have released budget versions of their ‘original’ or ‘standard’ mattresses in recent years. These are usually thinner and have a less generous warranty period, but we’ve rated them based on their standard models. 

Also, make sure you read the smallprint as some warranties have multiple clauses whilst others are relatively straightforward. Figures are correct at the time of writing.

How do the Emma Mattresses compare to each other?

As the table below shows, the biggest jump up in specification is between the Emma Essential and the Emma Original. The warranty length doubles and the mattress depth increases significantly from 18cm to 25cm. This difference in depth is particularly beneficial if you are heavier than average and I would advise that it’s worth the upgrade for a mattress you are using regularly.

The leap up between the Emma Original and the Hybrid or Original Hybrid is – in my opinion – a subtler difference. The inclusion of full size springs on the Emma Original Hybrid gives it a similar design to the OTTY Hybrid mattress which is cheaper. Meanwhile, the use of foam alongside mini springs on the Emma Hybrid gives it a similar design to the Simba Hybrid Essential mattress which has a similar price but it much thinner at 20cm.