Playing With Fire, Part 3: What It's Costing Us
Posted by Angela Owen on 26th Oct 2026
Playing With Fire, Part 3: What It's Costing Us
By The Sleep Diva
Over the last two installments, I've walked through how mattress flammability regulation evolved over my 25 years in this business, where the chemical shortcut actually came from, and why the federal cigarette test is still built around a fire risk that's largely disappeared. This time: the fight over California's actual ban, and th
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Playing With Fire Part 2: Does it Even Work?
Posted by Angela Owen | The Sleep Diva on 24th Sep 2026
When we left off, the Chicago Tribune’s 2012 “Playing with Fire” series had just exposed Citizens for Fire Safety — the industry group funded entirely by the three biggest flame retardant manufacturers — as a front group that used fabricated testimony to lobby state legislatures. Here’s what happened next: almost nothing changed, except the letterhead.
Within a
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Playing With Fire, Part 1: How We Ended Up With Chemicals in Our Beds
Posted by Angela Owen, Sleep Diva on 24th Aug 2026
I sold my first mattress in 2000, out of a little retail store in Boulder, Colorado called Boulder By Design. Back then, there was exactly one flammability hurdle a mattress had to clear: the cigarette test. Lab techs would set 18 lit cigarettes on a mattress surface — nine on the bare surface, nine tucked under two sheets — and if the char never spread more than two inches, it passed.
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Big Mattress Is Watching — The Consolidation of an Industry and What It Costs the Rest of Us
Posted by Angela Owen on 21st Jul 2026
It was 1989 and I was a young college student who had just landed an entry-level position in the marketing department at Wells Fargo Bank headquarters in San Francisco. The early years of massive mergers and acquisitions were just beginning for America’s largest banks. New waves of deregulation had opened the door to interstate banking, and our little marketing department was suddenly very b
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