Specialty sleep's growth skews figures for Top 15
David Perry, Executive Editor -- Furniture Today, June 20, 2005
There are two very different bedding marketplaces in the United States. One is comprised of the companies that make and market conventional bedding, which is growing at a single-digit rate. The other is comprised of companies who make and market specialty bedding, the fastest-growing category in the industry. The leaders there are recording double-digit growth.
A look at our May 30 report on the Top 15 U.S. Bedding Producers shows the two are performing at different levels. Two amazing specialty sleep powerhouses, Tempur-Pedic and Select Comfort, continue to generate results that almost defy belief. The mainline conventional producers look like weak sisters in comparison, when it comes to growth rates.
In 2004, Tempur-Pedic, the visco-elastic mattress producer, grew wholesale shipments for its domestic mattress business by $132 million, hitting $320 million. That's a 70.2% increase. Select Comfort, the airbed maker and retailer, grew its wholesale bedding shipments by $66 million to $263 million, a 33.5% increase.
Sealy, the industry's largest producer, grew by 11.1% to set the pace for the Big Four. That's a very strong year, but not close to the kind of growth recorded by Tempur-Pedic and Select Comfort.
The $132 million gain in shipments at Tempur-Pedic would, all by itself, rank Tempur-Pedic in the No. 8 position on the list. And Select Comfort's $66 million increase would, by itself, put that company in the No. 15 slot.
Growth like that has the effect of making solid growth look somewhat weak in comparison.
Tempur-Pedic and Select Comfort numbers helped give the Top 15 an overall 12.6% shipment gain in 2004. Without those two, the rest of the list grew a somewhat-less-robust 8.7%. (This assumes 2004 shipments for our two new players on the list, Corsicana and Symbol, were flat compared to 2003, a year for which we do not have estimates of their performance.)
That 8.7% figure is a better benchmark number for conventional producers. Using that as the basis of comparison, Sealy and Simmons outperformed their conventional colleagues, while Serta and Spring Air were on the underperforming side of the ledger. Other conventional players with above-average years would be King Koil, IBC and Restonic.
It's useful to look at conventional producers as a group because what we have here is a mixing of apples, or the conventional bedding producers, and oranges, or the two specialty sleep 800-pound gorillas. Given the huge difference in how those two segments are growing, and the critical mass Tempur-Pedic and Select Comfort clearly have achieved, the total Top 15 growth rate of 12.6% is deceptive.
The good news is that almost every producer on our Top 15 list is growing. But the great news for the specialty sleep segment is that its two leaders are steamrolling through the marketplace on a merry ride.
Contact David Perry at dperry@reedbusiness.com
