TeddyBed: The Story Behind the Brand
TeddyBed: The Story Behind the Brand
Two school friends from South Africa. Two new countries. One problem neither of them could solve as fathers.
Lance Metz and Daniel Hoffmann grew up together in South Africa, but their paths diverged before converging again on opposite sides of the Tasman. Lance, a fourth generation mattress manufacturer who built and operated a successful sleep business in South Africa immigrated to New Zealand in 2020. Daniel, a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful startups to his name, made the move to Australia in 2022.
When each of them went looking for the right sleep solution for their young children, they hit the same wall. What the market called a "children's mattress" was, in reality, an adult mattress re-labelled and remarketed, but not fundamentally rethought. Nobody had designed for how children actually sleep, or for the realities parents deal with at 2am: the wet sheets, the midnight clean-ups, the chaos that comes with raising small humans. The mattresses available weren't built for growing bodies, weren't built for the accidents that are simply part of childhood, and in many cases contained materials that no parent would choose if they knew what was inside.
For Lance, with four generations of mattress making in his blood, that gap was impossible to ignore. For Daniel, it was the kind of problem he'd spent his career turning into a business.
So they did what old friends do. They got to work.
TeddyBed was born in 2021 from that shared frustration of two fathers who couldn't find what their children needed, and who had exactly the right combination of skills to build it themselves. Lance brought the manufacturing depth. Decades of hands-on expertise, an international network of sleep specialists and engineers, and an uncompromising standard for what goes inside a mattress. Daniel brought the entrepreneurial engine to turn that knowledge into a brand built to scale.
They launched in New Zealand in 2022, then brought TeddyBed to Australia. Every mattress is engineered specifically for growing bodies with the firm support developing spines actually need, foams certified free of formaldehyde, heavy metals, and harmful chemicals, and washable covers made partly from recycled ocean plastic. The bed frames grow with the child. Nothing is borrowed from the adult sleep market and scaled down.
The goal is to become Australia's most sustainable kids' sleep brand. But the starting point was more personal than any mission statement. Two dads standing in their children's bedrooms, realising that something as fundamental as a good night's sleep simply hadn't been done properly for kids.
So they built it from scratch.
