Dunlopillo arrived at BBH in the middle of the 1980s.  The company was part of a group that included Liberty’s, already a BBH retail client, which is how the agency was alerted to the business. As various parts of the group shifted or were sold off, it went on to become a trading group called BTR.

It didn’t seem an enormously attractive prospect creatively.  No-one rushed to work on it. The UK bed market was 99% dominated by metal sprung mattresses, covered in cotton or horsehair ticking, wrapped in a thick cotton outer layer. The bed buying cycle was – and still is in 2026 – about every ten to fifteen years. “Low interest” summed it up perfectly.

Dunlopillo was based in the Midlands, a small, labour-intensive mattress manufacturer, whereby air was pumped through liquid latex, tapped from rubber trees mostly in Malaysia and Sumatra, and then wrapped in simple fabric. The products were a difficult sell in store because, after the self evident firm comfort and support, floor sales people had to explain that you would be sleeping on rubber.  It sounded pervy at worst, hot and sticky at best.

Under John Bartle’s watchful eye, working with a planner called Clare Skinner, Martin and I were charged with attacking the brief.  In a nutshell, we had to make the dull objects people sleep on newsworthy, urgent and appealing.  A tough one.

With the luxury of about a month to develop a campaign, after endless false starts, we began inventing mad facts about what happens when you sleep.  How much air (and therefore dust) you breathe in. How much a human being sweats.  What sort of creatures, ideally disgusting ones like lice, fleas, bedbugs and so on, are likely to visit the typical sleeping individual.  The most surprising thing of all was that, when we took our invented ‘facts’ via the kind hand of Clare to medical professionals, they not only confirmed their veracity but actually upped the ante in most cases.

The three ads that were finally commissioned covered sweat, dust and bed bugs.  I can’t remember exactly which august medical body stood up for their claims, but it must have been something like the BMA (British Medical Association)  or similar.  There was a particular, internal anxiety about running the bed bug ad, as its negative associations could have brushed off onto the whole idea of latex mattress and killed ther market. Justifiable fear, at the the time.

The photographer for ‘Bath’ and ‘Dust’ was Nadav Kander.  He had kindly taken his first ever advertising shot for Martin shortly before, a black and white frame of a loaf of sliced bread for Asda. In his Islington studio, Martin and I watched him painstakingly photograph the pajama-clad bath man and the dust covered child.  The colour impact of the layouts was all down to the Galton genius.  I don’t think I’d write as much copy today, but the layouts – again, thanks to Martin – encouraged the read.

It’s the only time in our lives that we were told to stop advertising.  There was an over 30% uplift in sales (a Dunlopillo mattress’ price range at the time was between £200 – £400, a significant premium on conventional bedding). The factory couldn’t make beds fast enough.  So successful was the uplift, that the group sold the business to a French corporation for a premium, and Dunlopillo quietly faded out as a UK-present brand over the next three years.

I still sleep on a Dunloppilo mattress and always will.

There was a plague of bedbugs in Paris this last summer (2025, as there was back in 2024.)

UK arrivals like the Emma Mattress, Simba and Hypnia and one of two others in the last decade have started to break down the mattress landscape of the giant Sleepeezees, Silentnights and one or two others.  It’s become a little more interesting as a market.  But human beings, male and female, still sweat about twenty gallons of water into their mattresses every six weeks. 

Sleep well.