EverRest makes the products people sleep on, foam mattresses, pillows, and, through a UK-based customer relationship, bed and bath linens as well. Built on more than 20 years of Danish design heritage and expanded through a 2024 merger with an American partner, EverRest has grown into a full-service, vertically integrated partner for major retailers, taking products from development through sourcing to the customer's door. That scale runs on a global supply chain spanning China, Vietnam, India, and Serbia, and on a standard of operational rigor, including compliance, that EverRest treats as core to the brand, not just a back-office function.
Keeping that supply chain in line is split across two functions: compliance and ESG, run out of Denmark with a colleague also based in the US, and quality assurance, run globally out of the US following EverRest's merger with sister company Malouf, with teams covering the US, China, and Vietnam. To keep pace with that growing complexity, EverRest turned to Qarma's supplier compliance and quality modules.
Compliance built on email and SharePoint
Before EverRest's compliance team grew, the setup was simple by necessity.
“We didn't really have a system before we used Qarma. It was just... online, everything,” — Sanne Hansen, EverRest's Compliance Specialist
With only a handful of suppliers tied to its largest customer, that was manageable. Then EverRest picked up a new customer with dozens of its own suppliers, and the supplier base jumped to around 25 almost overnight. Certificates, questionnaires, and test reports that used to live in a handful of SharePoint folders were suddenly spread across inboxes with no consistent owner.
The new customer relationship also came with its own compliance headaches. It had accumulated as many as 60 suppliers by shopping around for the best price on every order, more than it could realistically hold to its own testing and certification requirements. Consolidating that supplier base became a project of its own: fewer, closer supplier relationships that EverRest could actually hold accountable to certifications, CO2 targets, and the growing list of EU requirements, rather than a sprawling list it had no real leverage over.
Once suppliers were in the system, the shift became less about efficiency and more about visibility.
“It's a very insecure way of storing your documentation, just to do it in SharePoint and Excel sheets. Moving everything into a system that stores it for you... is a lot better than having it in SharePoint. Qarma also removes the threat of having duplicate documents sitting everywhere, because you can just upload one source document that can be shown in different locations.” — Line Kerbech, Compliance & ESG manager
That single-source approach now underpins how EverRest collects declarations of conformity, supplier certificates, and ESG data, headcount, gender split, energy mix, through questionnaires tied directly to each supplier's profile in Qarma. It's also changed something more basic: knowing who to ask.
“The contact information stuff is nice, because before I always had to go and ask sourcing: what is the email, which person do I have to ask for this supplier? Now I can just look it up.” — Line Kerbech
That matters because EverRest's compliance requirements keep expanding. Between the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), the General Product Safety Regulation, and the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) obligations tied to packaging waste, the team is collecting more supplier data than ever. Separately, EverRest's own science-based emissions targets are driving a similar shift, the company now needs supplier-reported data it can actually verify. When a Vietnamese supplier submitted a greenhouse gas calculation based on the wrong national grid emission factor, having the data centralized in Qarma made it possible to catch the error and push back on a specific, documented submission rather than chase it through email.
Rebuilding quality from two different starting points
On the quality side, EverRest's Senior QA Manager, Jon Craig, inherited a similar problem from a different direction.
When Jon joined in mid-2024 and took over the global quality team later that year, he found himself managing two regional teams that had never worked the same way. The China team, already tied to EverRest's Danish operations, was sending inspection reports as Word documents, while the other team sent photos over email, with no consistent format and, in some cases, no clear owner on the receiving end.
“One team just sent photos, no context. I don't even know what I'm looking at. They were using Word, and I don't know who received those reports... they were more of a repository for future reference, in case a client [asked] with no specifications to reference.” Jon Craig Senior QA Manager
His first move was building out detailed, standardized checklists and getting buy-in from a reluctant team who were used to doing things in their existing way. Qarma’s account manager, assisted by running webinars to train factory QC staff directly using real inspection scenarios, while Jon's team handled follow-up questions.
Vietnam gave Jon a cleaner slate. With no legacy team or process to untangle, he built a new quality engineering function from scratch and pushed the checklists further, requiring measurements with built-in tolerances so inspectors don't have to interpret a tape reading themselves, and requiring photo or video evidence for things like function-testing adjustable bed motors, where “the box is checked yes” was never good enough on its own.
Corrective actions changed the way both teams handle a rejected batch.
“In the past you would send an email and say, hey, just so you know, we rejected your batch, please get back to us on what you're doing about it. And it kind of just got lost in the emails,” — Jon Craig
Now, corrective actions get assigned and tracked directly against the supplier in the system.
Turning inspection data into leverage
The clearest payoff has been EverRest's ability to use documented, historical data to get factories, and its own management to act on problems that used to be invisible.
One example: a recurring foam-cracking defect showing up right off the production line. Jon's team noticed a trend of rejected batches building up in Qarma's inspection data. That trend was enough to prompt them to go back to the factory and request six months of the internal lab's batch test results. Running that data through a statistical process control analysis showed that, while individual measurements were technically within specification, the process as a whole wasn't actually under control. That evidence was enough to get the factory's engineering team to invest in tightening the process rather than treating each incident as a one-off.
“It kind of starts off as just a measly old inspection report that says, hey, we found this. A month later, hey, we found it again. But you have to put data points to it to make it really make sense to people, to invest the time and resources to dig into these things.” — Jon Craig
The same approach has driven down complaints about foam yellowing, a long-standing, recurring issue for one of EverRest's largest customer, and one of the first problems Jon inherited when he took over the Vietnam team. By documenting incoming and inline inspections instead of only final inspections, and holding factories to a clear standard, nothing ships yellow, knowingly, EverRest has been able to close the feedback loop that never existed before.
“Before, the factory would just be like, the customer doesn't [see it], there was no feedback loop. So the factory didn't really know what the customer was seeing. The complaints have dropped dramatically. I get a monthly report [from our largest customer]; yellowing has almost dropped off that list.” — Jon Craig
Growing Together
Line and Jon rarely compare notes day to day. One is chasing certificates and ESG data out of Denmark, the other is chasing defect rates out of the US, but they've landed on the same conclusion from opposite ends of the business: a supply chain this size only holds together if the data behind it is centralized, trusted, and actionable, not scattered across whoever happened to answer an email that week.
On the compliance side, Line and her colleague Sanne are moving certificate renewals fully into Qarma, finishing supplier onboarding, and rolling out a product compliance module that ties test history directly to individual products, a big unlock for GPSR safety assessment documentation, and for an eventual move into direct-to-consumer channels, where EverRest will own compliance requirements it currently inherits from its customers.
Line also wants to bring photo evidence into compliance work the way Jon's team already does for quality, verifying fire escapes and safety equipment at supplier sites, or having a supplier photograph a packaging weight rather than just entering a number, addressing real trust issues one customer has had with suppliers in the past.
On the quality side, Jon is working with Qarma to turn factory technical assessments, currently a spreadsheet uploaded as a final document, into a structured questionnaire, with findings, follow-ups, and severities tracked directly in the system. And once inspection data is consistently clean, he wants to use that history to run quarterly review meetings with factories, turning scorecards into a standing conversation rather than one-off corrections.
“Qarma's like the backbone of our quality inspections and our compliance pieces, and we're trying to streamline everything through Qarma. It might sound strange that Qarma's evolving, but so are we and that's what I like, that we can grow together.”
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