WE'RE PROUD OF OUR FAMILY
Avocado's directly operated factory — and a story we are proud to share.
LOVING TRANSPARENCY
& ACCOUNTABILITY
In the mattress industry, cross-border manufacturing is usually structured to create distance: a brand buys finished goods from independent factories it does not run, and never has to answer for what happens inside them. We built the opposite. Our Tecate facility is directly operated by Avocado, staffed entirely by Avocado employees, and is GOTS organic-certified — held to the same independently audited standard as our California operations. This page exists because we are proud to show you our Tecate factory, before you even asked where it is. (Hint: It's about a two-hour drive from our Los Angeles mattress factory.)
DIRECTLY OPERATED.
NOT CONTRACTED.
Most of the industry's cross-border manufacturing runs through independent contract factories — facilities a brand buys from but does not run. We built ours differently. Our Tecate, Baja California, facility is directly operated by Avocado, and all 305 people who work here are Avocado employees, hired, trained, and paid under Avocado policies. We control production standards, workplace conditions, and certification compliance ourselves. That distinction is the whole point: when a brand owns the factory, it owns the accountability for everything inside it — the materials, the methods, and the people. We chose to own all three.
WHAT WE MAKE
IN TECATE
Tecate is where our foundations, pillows, and the City Bed line are made, as well as some of the sewn accessories that complete an Avocado bedroom. Every mattress, by contrast, is hand needle-tufted 150 miles north in Fullerton, California. We located accessory sewing and some woodworking here because the region carries a deep tradition of textile and furniture craftsmanship, and that skill is hard to find at this level of precision. The craftsman sanding a solid-wood frame in our film is not on an assembly line — he is finishing a piece by hand, to a standard our certifications require and customers expect.
SHARING THE SAME ORGANIC STANDARDS
GOTS does not only certify the finished mattress — it certifies the facility that makes it, and the conditions of the people on the floor inside it. The vision printed on the shirt in our film — to be the world's most sustainable brand — is the standard an independent auditor measures on the floor in Tecate, the same way it's measured in Fullerton. A worker sewing a pillow in Baja California and a bedmaker tufting a mattress in California are covered by the same audited protections — fair pay, safe conditions, freedom of association. Most brands manufacturing across a border can't say that, because they don't run the factory on the other side. We do.
BEYOND WHAT CERTIFICATION REQUIRES
Certification sets a floor. We have chosen to build above it. Our Tecate team members earn a living wage and receive comprehensive benefits, including family health care, three weeks of paid vacation, and annual immunizations. The facility provides deeply subsidized daily meals and keeps a nurse on site. None of this is required to pass an audit — which is exactly why we measure it. The footage of our team playing soccer in the hills outside the plant is not set dressing. It is what a workplace looks like when the people in it are treated as the reason the company exists, not a line on its cost sheet.
THE SHELTER MODEL
Manufacturing in Mexico, we use a shelter arrangement — a common structure in which a third-party provider handles administrative and regulatory infrastructure so a foreign company can operate legally and efficiently. We want to be precise about what that does and does not mean. The shelter provider manages paperwork. Avocado manages everything that touches the product and the people: hiring, training, production standards, workplace conditions, and GOTS compliance (CU863637). We are explaining the arrangement, in plain terms, because transparency is only credible when a company discloses the parts it could just as easily have left unsaid.
OUR VISION
TWO FACTORIES.
ONE ACCOUNTING.
Tecate is one part of a larger commitment — directly operated facilities on both sides of the border, every team member an employee, every standard independently verified. The high standards we are measured against are the same at both factories, and we name them plainly: GOTS certification, the ILO core labor conventions, living wages, family healthcare, an on-site nurse, and an independent annual audit with the power to revoke it all. We publish what we have not yet solved alongside what we have, because a sustainability report that only accounts for progress is not an honest accounting.
The full details on Tecate — workforce, wages, sourcing, and waste — live in our annual report.