Saylors builds two chains in Chicago
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, September 20, 2004
Bedford Park, Ill. — A cab ride on a snowy December night 20 years ago put Tom Saylors into the bedding business.
He was the cab driver that night. His passenger was George Smith, the owner of Bedz, a Chicago bedding specialty chain.
"We were stuck in traffic and the snow was coming down," Saylors recalled the other day. "Smith saw something in me — an entrepreneurial spirit that I didn't even know I possessed, and he thought I would make a good fit for his bedding business."
Saylors wasn't so sure. He was driving a truck during the day and a cab at night. Selling a mattress to someone? No way.
But early the next year he joined Bedz as a manager in training. He worked for the business for three years, learning something about himself.
"I wasn't sure I could work in retail," Saylors admitted. "I found out I was wrong."
Saylors found the beginnings of a career in bedding that has vaulted him to the upper echelons of the fiercely competitive Chicago bedding scene.
His 80-store Chicagoland bedding empire has two faces today: Mattress World and Bedding Experts.
The two chains, which carry the same product lines — Sealy and Stearns & Foster — compete against one another in some instances, but together give him a major piece of the Chicago bedding pie.
By all accounts, he's successfully pulled off a tough challenge, merging two retail operations with different cultures into one thriving company.
Mattress World is the native son. Saylors and his wife, Catherine, founded that retailer in July 1988. "My wife and I were 27 and 25 at the time and we thought we had picked up on the retail game," he said. "We opened our first store in the West Lawn neighborhood of Chicago. That store is still there today."
Today, Mattress World operates 28 stores across Chicagoland. Four are in Indiana, where there also are four Bedding Experts stores.
Bedding Experts is the newest part of Saylors' bedding portfolio. That retailer was started in Chicago in 1983, when he was still driving a truck. It grew into a powerhouse in the late 1980s and early 1990s before it was sold to Heilig-Meyers in 1998. Mattress Discounters later acquired Bedding Experts, and it was that company that sold Bedding Experts to Mattress World in June 2002.
In assimilating Bedding Experts, Saylors used his Mattress World stores as a training ground. An infusion of Mattress World employees into the Bedding Experts stores helped those locations post a 27% sales gain. Meanwhile, the Mattress World stores grew by almost 3%.
Sold on Sealy
A constant in those times of change was the strong offering of Sealy products.
"We've aligned ourselves with Sealy for a long time," Saylors said. "I learned early at Bedz that the Sealy brand was a dominant presence in Chicago. We thought that if we aligned ourselves with Sealy, it would work out."
In its earlier years, Mattress World was a multivendor retailer. But a menu heavy with Sealy offerings makes for a satisfying main course, Saylors found.
"It's my opinion," he said, "that the Sealy brand is so powerful that it makes an average salesperson better than an above-average salesperson selling another line. I know it sounds like I'm drinking Sealy Kool-Aid, but I know about the power of the Sealy brand as sure as I'm sitting here."
He is sitting, at this moment, in his office next to his 40,000-square-foot warehouse in the western Chicago suburb of Bedford Park, just a few minutes from Midway Airport.
Saylors acknowledges that combining the two businesses has not been without its share of challenges.
"We brought a mom-and-pop culture to the table," he said. "The Bedding Experts culture was a little different. I still consider myself a mom-and-pop operation. I didn't even have a lawyer until I made the acquisition."
Most of the Bedding Experts stores made the cut. The chain had 58 stores and a warehouse when Saylors and his wife acquired it. Today, after shuffling locations and re-negotiating existing leases, there are 52 stores in the Bedding Experts chain.
A significant number of the Bedding Experts employees Saylors inherited also made the cut. He said he learned the importance of strong employees when he built Mattress World. "The manager can make or break a location," he said.
Closing underperforming stores and seeking gold in new retail locations are basic skills any broadly based retailer must possess.
"You have to shuffle the deck," Saylors said. "If you don't, you get in trouble."
Saylors is pleased with the cards he's playing in Chicagoland. Sales are up. The company doesn't release its volume, but bedding observers estimate it at somewhere north of $45 million annually.
Having seen some national bedding retailers stumble, Saylors is looking to stay true to his roots.
"We have no aspirations of going into other large markets," he said. "We are definitely moving in the right direction here."
Mattress World was recently nominated for the BBB Torch Award for business ethics. "That is no small feat," Saylors said, "because in retail you accept that you can't please all the people all the time, but we obviously are doing something right! It's an honor just to be nominated."
It's all a bit heady for a man who thought that someday he would be starring on the baseball diamond, not the bedding diamond.
"I was supposed to be a professional baseball player," Saylors said. "But God had other plans for me."
Mattress World acquires 7 Indiana stores
05/25/2009Bedding Experts sold
06/30/2002Bedding Experts make-a-wish
07/13/2008
