Man quits job to become mattress tester, giving 'sex scores', and now makes six figures
A man who quit his £65,000-a-year senior marketing job to become a professional mattress tester after his “amateur reviews” were swamped with clicks now runs a successful business assessing their performance, including a “sex score”. Derek Hales, 34, has tried hundreds of mattresses since launching his company Naplab in 2021 and has devised a series of experiments to determine which makes for the best rest. Each mattress is sent to Derek’s “testing studio” and mounted on a solid bed frame before being scored against eight criteria: cooling, motion transfer, response time, edge support, sex, pressure relief, off-gassing and company. Each category involves a series of experiments, like dropping a 12lb medicine ball on the mattress to measure the shock waves, or using a high-speed camera to see how quickly it bounces back into shape. To determine which mattress is best for doing the deed, Derek looks at five key factors, including bounce, edge support, noise, pressure and cooling, to produce a score of zero to 10, with 10 being “exceptional sex performance”.