Can You Design a Custom Pillow? Here’s What We Know.
The Pluto process starts with a three-part quiz consisting of roughly a dozen questions, which took me a breezy three minutes to complete. It includes fairly straightforward questions about your sleeping position, mattress firmness, pillow height, and preferred pillow firmness. It also includes a text box where you can type your thoughts and desires, which will factor into your pillow build.
Unlike with other product “quizzes,” you do not see a result that indicates exactly what pillow you will get; the data needs to go through Pluto’s algorithm first, and then, according to the results, it is assembled at the company’s Los Angeles factory. Your pillow remains a mystery until it arrives on your doorstep.
The Wirecutter sleep team is a mixed bag of sleepers, ranging in height from 5-foot-1 to 5-foot-10, and all with different sleep styles, so our pillow styles were, in fact, all different. For example, Claire, our editorial assistant, is 5-foot-1 and sleeps on her stomach; she received a floppy 4-inch-tall quilted-cover pillow. Meanwhile, I, a 5-foot-4 fetal-position side sleeper (imagine a boiled shrimp), received a firmer, 6-inch-tall smooth-cover pillow.
When we unboxed all the pillows, we realized that their basic construction was the same. At the core was a blue memory-foam slab, sandwiched between two layers of polyester stuffing sewn into the pillow cover. All of the foam slabs appeared to be of the same variety, but they had slightly different thicknesses. The website shows other foams beyond the blue foam we all received, and Pluto says that the foam core it uses depends on your quiz answers. (All of its foams are CertiPUR-US–certified, which means they’re free of chemicals such as formaldehyde, heavy metals, and certain flame retardants, which is something we like to see in a product we put our faces on for around eight hours a day.)
The most noticeable differences across our pillows lay in the overall height, or loft, and the amount of stuffing fiber included in the cover. The total thicknesses of our pillows ranged from about 4 inches up to 7.5 inches tall. While that isn’t a huge range, Pluto told us that its pillows can range from 2.5 inches to a whopping 12 inches thick. The website also indicates that some fiber fill is thicker, or coarser, than other fiber fill, but we couldn’t examine our pillows’ fill, as the fill is sewn into the pillowcase.
Another big difference between our pillows was in the pillowcases. Two of us got the quilted variety, and two got the smooth cotton. The quilted case, made from a polyester/polyethylene blend and described as the “cool-to-the-touch” case, is automatically given to you if you say in the quiz that you run hot at night. The smooth case is 100% cotton. Both cases are Oeko-Tex Standard 100–certified.
Even though we found a good amount of variety in the four pillows we received, I was still skeptical about how involved Pluto’s algorithm could be. I contacted Pluto after examining our pillows to understand how the quiz answers are weighted. Co-founder Susana Saeliu explained that it’s not a “static formula,” with some body stats taking priority over others. “It really depends on how all the answers interact,” she wrote. When the company was started, she added, they used sleep position as the number one most important factor in determining the pillow build, but customer feedback led them to create a more complex algorithm.
With my pillow, for example, my mattress firmness (I have a firm memory-foam mattress) and sleep position (side) played a big role, Saeliu said. So too did my desperate plea for some serious loft, which I left in a note at the bottom of the quiz; Saeliu said they factored that request into my build, as well.
Overall, we found that our pillows were fine-tuned to our desires, but they fell short in some respects. One tester joked that it felt a little like using a dating app: Your match could have all the right attributes online, tailored to your preferences, but still disappoint in person.
