Holy Smokes, The Nook Pebble Mattress!

So a couple of weeks ago a publicist friend--and seriously, while they're probably the most professionally hyperfriendly population on earth, I can count on one Simpsons hand the number of publicists I'd actually consider calling a friend--a publicist friend calls and asks what I thought the deal was with the slagging this crib mattress, the Nook, was getting on Celebrity Baby Blog's comments section.

And I'm like, wow. First through third, my sympathies to anyone who actually has to concern herself with the content of that online baby crack den, much less the comments. Much less People Magazine itself. And then I thought, how in the world could a crib mattress get a rise out of anyone?

But holy smokes, have you seen this thing? Forget the Bugaboo of Crib Mattresses, or even the Orbit of Crib Mattresses. It's like the Klingon High Command of Mattresses. The 2001 of Crib Mattresses. The Avatar of Crib Mattresses.

Sure there are mattresses with latex cores wrapped in organic wools, but what about waterproof nano? The Nook is organic AND nano. It's nanorganic! Which is key, not because it eliminates the need for a mattress pad, but because it eliminates the need for a sheet. Which is good, because who would buy a mattress that looks so awesomely weird and then put a sheet over it?

And that's one of the Nook's challenges: it looks freaky. While it's easy to nod about the air circulation-promoting reasons the Nook designers put forward for the bumps, there is no denying that thing looks like Mattress From Another Planet.

But the other challenge Nook faces is not, I think, the price, which is $550 [pronounced five hundred and fifty freaking dollars]. In a world of designer cribs, they're clearly making a play for the importance--even the greater significance, at least for the kid--of a premium, high performance mattress.

And they could be right. Unless you're on a hunt for organic, or latex or allergenic or whatever specialty mattresses, which are several hundred dollars and range from earthy to fugly, normal crib mattresses are an afterthought. They're usually bought on some vague price/value calculation, based on how much you just dropped on the crib you thought so long and hard about. And they all turn out to be nearly identical, plastic-wrapped boxes.

Nook's making the case for thinking about a crib mattress--and maybe even for shifting some dough from the crib to the mattress itself. And to the extent a mattress matters at all, I can totally see that.

No, Nook's biggest challenge, as the People Magazine blowback indicates, is also the last, faint hope for the fate of humankind: there is no such thing as an It Mattress.

Knuckleheaded people buy all sorts of things--from strollers to Babypluses to elective C-sections--because some random AMW [actress/mom/whatever] scored one in a gifting suite somewhere. That a Kardashian cannot be photographed dragging a Nook down Robertson is ultimately a good thing, even if it does make our pioneering mattress designers' dreams somewhat harder to achieve.

Learn | Shop: Nook Sleep System [nooksleep.com via publicist]