Spring Air cutting warranties to 5 yrs.
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, April 5, 2004
ELK GROVE VILLAGE, Ill. — Spring Air is planning to shorten its warranties to five years when it brings out new fire-resistant bedding lines later this year.
Bedding's fourth-largest producer plans to convert all its lines to the new California FR standard by the end of this year, said President Jim Nation. California begins enforcing its new open-flame mattress standard on Jan. 1, 2005.
Warranties on flagship bedding lines today generally are for 10 years, a period Nation says is far longer than the warranties on other long-lived products.
"It is our intention to change our warranties to five years on our flagship lines to bring our products more in line with other consumer durables," he said. Spring Air is the first major to announce such a move.
Nation contends that consumers confuse the length of the warranty with the useful life of the bedding. Warranties guard against defective workmanship but don't guarantee product life, a fact that often gets lost on retail sales floors, he said.
Shorter warranties would be good for the entire bedding industry, Nation said, because they would help reduce the replacement cycle, thereby expanding the market.
Spring Air's plans to shorten its warranties come at a time when there is an increasing focus on bedding warranties. Sealy CEO Dave McIlquham recently said that bedding manufacturers "do a disservice to the industry and to our retail partners when they distort and lengthen consumers' expectations of our products' life cycle by using warranty duration to make quality and workmanship superiority claims at the point of sale."
