Drive takes Sherman from store to top
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, January 2, 2005
St. Paul, Minn. — Bob Sherman got his first bedding job when he was still in high school.
His church leader, Ken Larson, was running a bedding retailer called Slumberland. Sherman joined the company one summer and delivered mattresses in the St. Paul market, where he lived at the time.
Larson's Slumberland remains a potent retail force in the Twin Cities market, with Larson as CEO and president. And Sherman has graduated from his humble beginnings in bedding to one of the top jobs in the industry: president of Serta International.
It all started, he recalled the other day, with that first job at Slumberland.
"This is my mentor," Sherman said when he saw Larson at Furniture/Today's Leadership Conference in Sarasota, Fla.
"I'm proud of him," Larson said. "I'm very proud of all the good people who have come through our company. That's part of our leadership philosophy. We want to encourage people to use their talents to the best of their ability."
"If you can better yourself," Sherman responded, "you should go out and do it."
Sherman eventually became a store manager for Slumberland, getting a thorough grounding in the retail side of the bedding business. Then he moved over to the manufacturing side, joining a Sealy factory in St. Paul operated by Richard Yulman.
That association later led him and Yulman to join Burt Kaplan, Barbara Bradford and others in establishing Midwest Bedding Co. in 1989.
That company bought a struggling Serta licensee in Wisconsin and eventually grew into Serta's largest licensee, a development that ultimately led to its gaining control of the Serta brand.
Sherman is now president of Serta International, the company responsible for the Serta brand around the world. He still does plenty of selling, a skill he first honed at Slumberland.
Larson recalls Sherman as more than holding his own on the sales floor. "When he started with us he was 16. He did very well and he successfully competed with people in their 20s and 30s," Larson said.
But Sherman had more than just selling skills. "There was a spark, a motivation," Larson said. "It was the drive to do things. I can't take credit for what he's doing now, but I'm proud of it."
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Drive takes Sherman from store to top
Jan 6, 2005
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