About Your Nectar
Published October 29, 2025
8 minNectar Expert Series: Interview with Norm Vaughn, Head of Product Engineering
In our very first expert interview, we snagged some time with Nectar's Head of Product Engineering, diving into his impressive career and – of course – all things mattress.
Table of contents
As Nectar’s editorial team, we work hard to get you all of the most relevant and up-to-date information to help you on your mattress buying journey. But sometimes, there’s just a better source to ask. Introducing Nectar Experts, where we interview professionals within the sleep industry, sharing their knowledge and expertise with our entire Nectar audience. While they won’t always be internal, we thought of no better place to start than with our very own Senior Director of Physical Product Engineering, Norm Vaughn. With a background in chemical engineering and an impactful career in both the automotive and mattress industries, Norm has been instrumental when it comes to delivering high-quality rest at the best possible price to millions of Nectar sleepers. Let’s dive in.
When you get the first prototype of a mattress, what are the kinds of things that you’re looking for? NV: What we would do is what’s called a “stack event”. If you can imagine, we have all of these slices of foam that are available. We’ll have a session where we come together physically, and literally create different sandwiches and layers and do some tweaking in real time. You always have to have a pitch in mind – what are we trying to sell? It’s understanding what each mattress is supposed to be, and then doing the stacks to dial in the best feel at the right price. I’m always calculating, whatever slices they pick and put in there, the cost of the materials and how they will impact the manufacturing cost. I’m balancing that in the background, but confirming ultimately that the feel is right.
YCZ: What would surprise people about the process that goes into creating what you would call a “simple” mattress? NV: When I switched to the mattress industry, a lot of my cohorts in the engineering world were like, “Wow. You’re making mattresses. That’s tough.”The reality is, when you’re pouring foam – just as a starting point – there’s a lot of twists and turns and baking and carving and shaping that has to happen for all of those components. And then to bring them together on a mass production line. And get it to the consumer as quickly as possible. There’s all kinds of engineering that comes into play there, right? Simple stuff, like I’ve got a steel wire for a spring coil set. There’s anywhere from 400 to 900 coils in any individual bed. And we want to deliver the same performance over thousands of builds of that same model. How am I going to get this wire? Who’s going to make it? Where does it come from? It all has to have this very technical underlying to make sure we’re getting the right wire from the right source. Foam itself is a fascinating thing, if you’ve never seen it poured. The scale of it is very large, and it’s a continuous process. I mean, to see this liquid just flow onto this table that’s moving away from you, and then watch it grow into this, four or five foot tall bun that’s as wide as a king-size bed. Just to watch it come together. As a chemical engineer, it’s really near and dear to my heart, because I get the kinetics and rate calculations and all that has to go into just mixing in real time. You have to understand the product, right? And you’ve got to control the production to make that product over and over.
Yael Chen Zion (Lead Copywriter): So let’s start right at the beginning. What drew you to the sleep industry, and how does developing mattresses differ from other products that you’ve worked on?
Norm Vaughn (Senior Director of Physical Product Engineering):
That’s a good question. Landing in the mattress industry was, I’m going to say, kind of serendipitous. I had been working for most of my career up to that point in explosives and airbags for automotive. And so I had really honed my skills around the whole life cycle process of developing new products.With airbags though, you’re very far removed from the consumer. When I did finally move into the mattress industry, with Tempurpedic, I was fascinated because it pushed me so much closer to the actual consumer, right? I liked that focus. I liked the ability to tweak and adjust over the life of the product. In automotive, once you launch something it’s pretty much done. But in the bedding world, it’s just a constantly evolving message. YCZ: A few follow-up questions to that.NV: Yeah. Yeah.YCZ: How did you then make the move to Resident, and what was it about Resident that was exciting to you in staying within the mattress industry?
(Editor’s note! Nectar’s parent company is called Resident, and is also behind a few other favorite mattress brands: DreamCloud, Awara, and Siena.) NV: So I was with Tempurpedic for 5 years before going back to the automotive world. It was a personal move, to relocate back to where my family wanted to live. And then the door opened up five years later, when an executive I had worked under reached out through a couple different channels and basically pitched the idea of coming over to Resident. When I started doing the research, the very first thing that sort of caught my interest was the fact that it was bed in a box – really the new disruptor that had hit the industry. And coming into the culture, Resident grabbed me with the way they address consumer needs, put energy into R&D, and followed their product all the way through its life. It was really a green field in that regard. I was able to go and challenge some current things in the product, and also think about new products in a different way than Resident had up to that point. It was different from Tempurpedic – much faster. So I had to learn new lessons.YCZ: Can you walk us through how you approach building a new product? Maybe touch on our internal processes, how we look at sleep science research, what kind of innovations we’re looking for… all of that.
NV: Again, my focus has always been to start with the consumer on any new development. You come in with a lot of questions: what is the consumer after, what is their budget, what is the value that’s most important to them. And then with materials: what are the innovations, the new yarns, the new items that are coming to market that we can hitch onto our designs to add value to our customers? It’s understanding those customers and then coming back and looking at our toolbox. What can we do? Where can we start? We’ve built out our consumer insights group, which does a lot of research into our consumers and understanding what’s most important to them.YCZ: What’s the process of development and engineering, from inception until we have the actual final mattress?
NV: I would say it’s about 18 months. We start by doing all of the consumer research, looking at technology. Resident aims to really understand what the current technology is and try to find the best value version possible. Automotive, I think, mirrors bedding in a lot of ways, in that all cars are going to have a lot of commonalities, but it’s those little extra pieces that are going to bring a consumer over to their specific product. With mattresses, there’s some inherent bedrock pieces. It’s those little extra bells and whistles that are going to pull us across. Once we understand the tech, I’ll go to Asia. And we’ll go and meet with five, six, seven different fabric sources. We’re going to go in and touch and feel, look at patterns and design. And after that I’ll create a roadmap and say, “Okay, here is the new lineup. Here are the ideas.” That’s not from me inventing it, but from hearing the creative group, the consumer research group, and certainly our leadership. YCZ: Basically, we take all of the information: trend research, consumer insights. You go and look at existing materials, the new best materials, and then you’re placing them in their hierarchy and setting them up to be built.When you get the first prototype of a mattress, what are the kinds of things that you’re looking for? NV: What we would do is what’s called a “stack event”. If you can imagine, we have all of these slices of foam that are available. We’ll have a session where we come together physically, and literally create different sandwiches and layers and do some tweaking in real time. You always have to have a pitch in mind – what are we trying to sell? It’s understanding what each mattress is supposed to be, and then doing the stacks to dial in the best feel at the right price. I’m always calculating, whatever slices they pick and put in there, the cost of the materials and how they will impact the manufacturing cost. I’m balancing that in the background, but confirming ultimately that the feel is right.
YCZ: What I would do to be in that room! How do you approach testing and validating those new materials or construction methods before they make it into our mattresses?
NV: All of our materials go through a battery of tests. It’s kind of obvious mechanical rubbing and poking and puncture and pull – all the different mechanisms that you can imagine your mattress experiences. Heat is always a consideration, as well as heat with moisture. It’s like this little ecosystem under your sheets that we want your mattress to tolerate and not break down. The fabric companies we work with are constantly innovating the same as we would, looking for ways to trim cost and add value.YCZ: And what about balancing innovation and reliability?
NV: We’re not out here looking to invent new molecules. We’re not looking to be the first to try something out – I wouldn’t say we’re opposed to it, but we’re not usually putting our money behind that. We’re paying close attention to what the market’s doing. And as new things emerge, or problems emerge, we’re watching what others are running to do to fix it.YCZ: So it’s reliable because it’s tried and true.
NV: Yeah. And I would say, coming back to the battery of tests that we do. At the foam and spring level, we do a variety of ASTM standard tests that, within the industry, have been proven to guarantee the reliability of your products. There’s also a variety of destructive tests and torture tests that we put the products through – to kind of just verify. We definitely make sure it’s doing what it’s claimed to do.YCZ: What would surprise people about the process that goes into creating what you would call a “simple” mattress? NV: When I switched to the mattress industry, a lot of my cohorts in the engineering world were like, “Wow. You’re making mattresses. That’s tough.”The reality is, when you’re pouring foam – just as a starting point – there’s a lot of twists and turns and baking and carving and shaping that has to happen for all of those components. And then to bring them together on a mass production line. And get it to the consumer as quickly as possible. There’s all kinds of engineering that comes into play there, right? Simple stuff, like I’ve got a steel wire for a spring coil set. There’s anywhere from 400 to 900 coils in any individual bed. And we want to deliver the same performance over thousands of builds of that same model. How am I going to get this wire? Who’s going to make it? Where does it come from? It all has to have this very technical underlying to make sure we’re getting the right wire from the right source. Foam itself is a fascinating thing, if you’ve never seen it poured. The scale of it is very large, and it’s a continuous process. I mean, to see this liquid just flow onto this table that’s moving away from you, and then watch it grow into this, four or five foot tall bun that’s as wide as a king-size bed. Just to watch it come together. As a chemical engineer, it’s really near and dear to my heart, because I get the kinetics and rate calculations and all that has to go into just mixing in real time. You have to understand the product, right? And you’ve got to control the production to make that product over and over.
YCZ: What would you say is the most rewarding part of engineering mattresses?
NV: Again, just to compare to when I worked on airbags, it can be a very scary concept that somebody’s going to use your product in the midst of one of the worst moments of their life – in a crash. In the mattress world, to come across people and to have them immediately light up. They’re like, “we bought a Nectar and we love it, and we bought another one because we loved it so much.” It’s very rewarding to have someone come back with that kind of appreciation.YCZ: It’s amazing. Okay, time for our last question. What mattress do you sleep on?
NV: Right now, I’m sleeping on the new DreamCloud Luxe mattress. I make it a point to be the first one to try our new products as often as I can – so I’ll spend at least a month on each bed as they come through the development process. And this one in particular, I’m kind of lingering on, because I really like it. It’s a beautiful bed, and just spot-on for what I prefer, and more importantly, what my wife prefers.Related ArticlesThe Complete Mattress Buying Guide (2025)What Is Memory Foam?Memory Foam vs Hybrid Mattress: What Is the Difference?Latex vs Memory Foam - What's Right for You?Mattress Pressure ReliefMattress Edge SupportMattress Recycling - Ultimate Guide on How To Recycle Your Old Mattress
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