Bedded down: a North Carolina company joins the bed-in-a-box movement making mattress shopping cool.

• Author: Logan, Rebecca
• Position: NC TREND: E-commerce - Staya Sleep

Christy Durbin can credit lack of sleep for her current business venture. Like many the Charlotte woman was waking up in the middle of the night, blaming her mattress. Like many, she had settled on a mattress that compromised between her sleep preference and her husband's. And like many, she is not a fan of mattress shopping.

But unlike most, the former executive at digital-marketing company Red Ventures has an MBA from Harvard and experience managing her own companies. Enter Staya Sleep, the company Durbin founded last year. Staya Sleep promises luxury mattresses that can be customized and delivered to doorsteps in boxes.

The company is among more than a dozen that have popped up across the country to compete in the bed-in-a-box market cracking the $14 billion traditional U.S. mattress industry. In 2014, New York-based online retailer Casper cut through the dozens of styles, dizzying discounts and high-pressure salespeople with its one-sleep-fits-all mattress that arrived on doorsteps in a box about the size of a dorm fridge. Last year, Casper reported $200 million in revenue. Still don't understand the mattress-in-a-box craze? Watch one of the countless viral "unboxing" videos on YouTube as mattresses unfurl and expand in dramatic fashion.

"Everybody sleeps," Durbin says. "There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the space. And there's opportunity now--with compression--to bypass that middleman."

Staya Sleep mattresses are made of individually wrapped steel microcoils combined with layers of foam. They are sealed in plastic, compressed, folded and rolled into boxes. A queen mattress is about $1,000, roughly the same as Casper's. Both offer free shipping, 100-night guarantees and free returns. The difference is Durbin's collaboration with North Carolina's storied furniture manufacturers, though she declines to name...