Ortho Mattress acquires 10 Warehouse leases
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, February 8, 2004
CERRITOS, Calif — CERRITOS, Calif. — Ortho Mattress has acquired the leases on 10 Mattress Warehouse stores in Tennessee, Kansas and Missouri, giving the bedding specialty chain its first stores outside California and a base for further Midwestern expansion.
The company, with 37 stores in Southern California, acquired eight stores in the greater Nashville area as well as a store in Kansas City and another in Topeka, Kan., from the bankrupt Westco Group.
They all have reopened as Ortho Mattress, said Ortho Chairman Ken Karmin. He would not disclose projected sales or the exact purchase price, but said the latter was less than $500,000.
Ortho will open a 40,000- to 50,000-square-foot Midwestern bedding assembly hub in the Nashville area to support the new stores and future growth.
"We're just going to be opportunistic," Karmin said. "We have the capacity to open a lot of stores, but we're all about controlled strategic growth, and we don't have any plans to operate beyond the places where we're already doing business."
In its California markets, Ortho Mattress will add a dozen stores this year, he said.
Ortho bills itself as Serta's largest single vendor in Southern California, but in the newly acquired stores, it won't be able to carry the brand because of existing dealer conflicts, Karmin said. The stores will carry the Ortho brand as well as the private-label Summerhill & Bischop line.
"Basically, it's up for grabs as for what we're going to do in terms of a national brand," Karmin said.
Westco, a former Top 100 company through its Sleep Fair and Mattress Warehouse stores, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last April. Ortho and affiliates of Innovative Mattress Solutions bid on Westco's assets after a failed reorganization attempt, eventually splitting the assets while the stores were wrapping up going-out-of-business sales.
IMS, with affiliates that operate 24 bedding specialty stores as Mattress Warehouse and Sleep Outfitters in West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, said its companies were acquiring Westco stores in the Ohio markets of Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, and the Louisville, Ky., market, but hasn't disclosed details.
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