Would You Pay $500 for Bed Sheets? I Finally Did, and Here’s Why

The other day I threw open the windows, ready to spring clean and flip the mattress. Then I started to strip my bed only to see…sheets shredded by my husband’s toenails.

How long has this situation been developing? I spend eight hours a day physically interacting with my bedsheets, so how did I miss this?

We all have private, recurring bedroom fantasies. Mine is that every night I tuck myself into crisp, unwrinkled, lavender-smelling sheets. But the sad reality is I give my bedsheets no attention—and on the rare occasions I do buy new ones, I get another cheap, $150 set that wrinkles, doesn’t wear well and feels limp after the fourth go-round in the laundry.

But spring is a season of renewal. Maybe I can change—with help.

“I’ll spend money on things for myself—like a $500 pair of boots—so why not on the bedsheets I use every day?” I asked Charles D. Lindsey, an associate professor of marketing at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Lindsey, whose research focuses on how consumers make choices, said it’s not unusual for shoppers to spend more money on items other people see.

“Clothing is a very public product, and you get social status from it. There’s the emotional satisfaction when someone says, “I love your sweater,’ ” he said. “But bedding is very private. You may be thinking, ‘Oh, that’s just something I sleep on.’ ”

A few centuries ago, I probably would have been more attached to my sheets—if I were lucky enough to have them. Before the 18th century, many people didn’t. They didn’t even have beds, much less separate rooms for sleeping, said historian Annie Coggan, an associate professor at Pratt Institute School of Design in Brooklyn. “They slept on the floor or with the servants.”

In the American colonies, beds and bedrooms were a symbol of wealth and status. “In probate inventories of the time, there was a hierarchy of how things were valued,” she added. “First was the bed linen—because a bedsheet took the most labor if you were weaving it yourself, or else it was imported from England or France, which made it dear. Then it was the table linen and then the rugs.”

These days, when an expensive queen-size sheet set with pillow cases costs upward of $500, bed linens would still rank high in the probate inventory of my estate. But my inner cheapskate can’t help but wonder: What makes sheets worth more than my $150 set?

“Oh, Michelle, when you have good sheets, it’s like having a love affair,” said Tricia Rose, founder of Rough Linen, a sheet maker in San Rafael, Calif., whose Orkney linen queen-size flat sheet is $217.

“In what way?” I asked.

“They absorb moisture so you feel cool and sleep better, they feel fresh on your bed for longer between washes and they will last 10 years if you care for them properly,” she said. Laundering in cold water is easier on the fabric, she says, and “whisk them from the dryer when they feel faintly damp instead of baking them to death.”

“But what about wrinkling? I can’t get the binding on the top sheet to lie flat even if I iron it,” I complained.

“On cheap sheets they sometimes don’t take care to cut the fabric with the grain,” she said.

Also, high-quality sheets are woven from extra-long strands of cotton or flax fibers, “which makes the yarn smoother, finer and softer,” said George Matouk Jr., a sheet maker in Fall River, Mass., whose company’s signature Lowell queen-size flat sheets cost $549 apiece. “They’re woven from cotton grown in the Nile valley, which has ideal conditions to grow the plants.”

My next call was to Manhattan interior designer Gideon Mendelson.

“If I were your client, and I hypothetically had a situation where my husband’s toenails shredded the sheets, how would you convince me to buy nice ones instead of cheaping out on them?” I asked.

“First, I would tell you what my mother, who was a designer, would say—that we all should spend on our shoes and our bed linens. Those are the things we experience the most in a day,” he said.

Next, he would recommend pedicure tools. “I hear about toenails, and dry heels, and both are bad for sheets,” he said. “I often put a nice pumice stone in the bathroom.”

“OK, I’m ready to make the leap—any other advice?” I asked.

He recommended choosing a solid color to complement the other textiles in the bedroom. “Sheets have to fit in with everything else, because they’re usually the last element you choose.”

“So, undyed linen,” I said.

“I lean toward a cotton percale myself,” he said.

But I prefer the texture of linen—and have long coveted Rough Linen’s heavyweight Orkney sheets (“The fabric weighs 8.3 rather than the typical 5.6 ounces per square yard of linen and will last longer,” Rose said).

I ordered a nearly $500 set of sheets. They were nice and flat post washing and damp-drying, and after I slept on them—so smooth! so luxurious!—I was a convert. I want these sheets to last forever.

So I put a toenail-care kit in the bathroom.

Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. He’s already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in $10 million in revenue this year.

One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.

The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.

Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room. “I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.

Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.

Ben Broca sitting in his home office. — Tech has seen an explosion of solo founders in the past year. Broca said he likes being able to work at his own speed, unencumbered by a team. Jonah Reenders for WSJ

An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.

In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist. “Now, AI can be a built-in business partner,” he said.

AI’s ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology’s ability to also handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hot spot.

Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase—nearly 45%—over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information-sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry.

This Census dataset doesn’t track solo-operated businesses. But the numbers broadly show—in tech and beyond—that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that’s a strong sign that solo operators are on the upswing.

“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator—which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake—attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May.

Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers’ accounts while paying to access Anthropic’s Claude to run his clients’ requests—that AI company, as well as others, charges based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source AI models from China.

Broca said he has raised $30 million from investors and, at the same time, has saved millions in salary since he hasn’t needed a team of software engineers.

Another risk: If it’s easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Fla.

“Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now,” said Johnston, 40, who used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit, with no employees, and is continuing to grow.

Troy Johnston said AI’s power and ease of use is an incredible boon for entrepreneurs like him—and also a double-edged sword. Luann Koerper

What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show how the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities.

“If everyone’s hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count?” said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees.

Koning also believes a soft hiring environment that’s left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.

Some founders cite different motives. “It’s a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one’s priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what’s possible,” said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Breinigsville, Pa.

Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social-media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. “It was like my chief of staff, a second in command,” he said.

The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is now back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company.

For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped her turn a passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help her manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms.

“I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,” said Vo, who lives in San Francisco.

Claire Vo smiling into the camera while recording a podcast. — Claire Vo used AI to code an app that’s on track to make seven figures in profit this year. Claire Vo

She put the app online for $1 a month, and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo’s company—which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer—now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. AI handles the company’s marketing, sales and customer support.

While AI is a shortcut, Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. “I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point,” she said.

Would You Pay $500 for Bed Sheets? I Finally Did, and Here’s Why

Why are we willing to spend that much for, say, nice boots, yet consider bed linens that cost that much unconscionably indulgent? Our columnist fights her way past this double standard.