Would You Spend $6,000 on a Mattress? This Ottawa Company Is Betting on It

The average person will buy about six mattresses in their adult life. Options abound: from an $800 foam mattress that unrolls and puffs up from a box that arrived at your doorstep to $100,000 for a status-y sleeper from Swedish maker Hästens, which uses horsehair for ventilation. In Canada, the mattress market is worth $3 billion and the biggest player is Sleep Country, which, like its U.S. counterpart Mattress Firm, has been buying up its competitors — Endy in 2018, a controlling stake in Hush in 2021, Silk and Snow and Casper’s Canadian operations in 2023. 

“There are no partners in the back, we’ve been offered to be [acquired] but we said no because we’re still enjoying it,” says Jean Corriveau, the founder of Ottawa-based mattress brand Obasan, where a customizable, organic queen-sized mattress will run you about $6,000. Corriveau started the company in 1985, shortly after graduating from the University of Ottawa. Back then, the brand was called Sleep Tech and sold standard spring and foam mattresses. The transition to organic started when Corriveau noticed that some of his customers had chemical sensitivities. “They couldn’t tolerate any synthetic materials — foam, polyester, and the formaldehyde would really affect them. So we started researching material that they could tolerate.”