Who Owns Birch Mattress? The Answer Is a Private Equity Firm
Birch sells organic wool, organic cotton and natural latex, with GREENGUARD Gold certification and a lot of copy about what isn’t in the mattress. It’s a good product. People who buy it are usually people who read labels.
So here’s a label worth reading. Birch is a brand of Helix Sleep, and since October 2021 Helix has been owned by Cerberus Capital Management.
Short answer, up front
Birch is owned by Cerberus, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. The founders kept a minority stake. The mattress itself hasn’t changed and the certifications are real. Whether the owner matters to you is a separate question from whether the product is good, and we’d rather you got to answer it yourself.
How the ownership actually works
In September 2021, Cerberus announced it was acquiring both Brooklyn Bedding and Helix Sleep and combining them into a single direct-to-consumer mattress platform. The deal closed that October. Cerberus said in its own release that the businesses would operate under a holding company “in partnership with their respective founders and other existing shareholders who would retain a significant minority ownership interest.”
So the founders are still there and still hold equity. Cerberus holds control. Birch sits inside Helix, inside that platform, inside the fund.
None of this appears on Birch’s website, which is normal and is also the reason we write these.
Why Cerberus is a name worth knowing
Most private equity owners are unremarkable. This one has a record that’s been examined in public more than once.
Cerberus bought Remington Arms in 2007. Remington manufactured the rifle used at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, and the firm spent years afterward trying to sell the business.
The bigger one is healthcare. Cerberus acquired the non-profit Caritas Christi hospital system in 2010, converted it to for-profit Steward Health Care, and exited having taken roughly $800 million out of it. Steward later collapsed into bankruptcy and hospitals closed. A 2024 report prepared by Senator Edward Markey found Steward patients spent longer in emergency rooms, were likelier to leave before being seen, and experienced higher death rates than the national average. Senators Warren and Markey wrote to Cerberus directly about its role.
That record is about a healthcare business, not about mattresses. We’re not claiming Cerberus is doing anything to Birch’s wool. We’re saying that if the reason you buy an organic mattress is that you think about where your money ends up, this is information you’d want.
What this doesn’t change
The mattress is still the mattress. Birch’s GREENGUARD Gold certification is real and independently audited, the wool and cotton are organic, and the build quality hasn’t been reported to have slipped since the acquisition. Our own non-toxic mattress roundup still includes it, with the ownership stated in its spec line.
We stopped excluding brands purely for having a parent company a while ago, because refusing to discuss the brands people actually search for served our purity rather than the reader. The rule now is disclosure. You get the facts and you decide.
What we’d buy instead, if this changes your mind
If the ownership question is the deciding one, two brands in the same category answer it differently. Naturepedic is family-owned and has been since 2003, with GOTS and GOLS certification across the range. Avocado is independent, privately held, a certified B Corp, and carries the deepest certification stack of any mattress brand we’ve profiled.
Both cost more than Birch. That’s usually how this goes.
So, is Birch worth buying?
If you want a certified organic hybrid at Birch’s price and the owner doesn’t factor into your decision, yes. It’s a good mattress and the certifications hold up.
If you’re buying organic partly because you’re trying to keep your money away from certain kinds of business, then no, and you’d have had no way of knowing that from the product page. Which is the whole point of this piece.
For how this pattern works across the wider industry, our greenwashing guide covers the ownership shuffle in more detail.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Birch mattress?
Birch is a brand of Helix Sleep, which has been owned by Cerberus Capital Management since October 2021. Cerberus acquired Helix and Brooklyn Bedding together and combined them into one direct-to-consumer platform. The founders of both businesses retained a significant minority stake.
Is Birch still organic and certified?
Yes. Birch uses organic wool and organic cotton with natural Talalay latex, and holds GREENGUARD Gold certification, which is an independent emissions standard. The acquisition didn’t change the materials or the certification.
Why does the owner of a mattress company matter?
Because the money goes somewhere. A certification tells you about the product; ownership tells you who profits from it. For most shoppers those are separate questions, and for some they’re the same question. We disclose it either way rather than deciding for you.
What are the alternatives to Birch?
Naturepedic is family-owned with GOTS and GOLS certification, and Avocado is an independent B Corp with the most thorough certification stack we’ve reviewed in mattresses. Both are in our non-toxic mattress roundup, and both cost more than Birch.
