Memory chaser
Veteran sales rep collects a wealth of mattress advertising and artifacts
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, March 26, 2006
Newark, N.J. — Former history teacher Samuel Chase, a long-time student of the bedding industry, has followed the history of mattress advertising and promotions for more than a decade.
"I've always been interested in how things came to be," he said, "so collecting mattress memorabilia has been a natural for me."
Along the way, he's amassed a collection of 1,000 mattress ads and items of mattress memorabilia, which give him a fascinating look at how little the bedding industry has really changed over the years.
"The more things change," Chase observed, "the more they stay the same."
Chase has been a sales representative with metal bed maker Elliott's Designs for more than 20 years, and he also represents fabric protection products, including BedBarrier, LeatherGuard and StainGuard, all part of the FabricTech2000 line. The portfolio of the certified home furnishings representative also includes work for Classic Sleep Products, Comfortaire and Seahawk Designs. He is based here.
Chase began his home furnishings career with Serta in 1972 as a key account rep, a position he also held with Stearns & Foster when he joined that company five years later. Then he rejoined Serta before moving over to the Elliott's Designs line.
His years of experience in the bedding business, coupled with his interest in history, led him to begin talking with collectors about old bedding ads. This was in the days before eBay made acquiring collectibles a big business.
Spreading the net
Chase would talk to collectors in online chat rooms and would inquire if they had old bedding ads. Sometimes the collectors would send him a whole pile of vintage ads, which he would carefully sift through, picking out what he wanted, and sending the collector a check for what he had selected.
Later, when the eBay phenomenon hit, Chase found success in that venue. He's also found old ads and memorabilia at flea markets.
One of his most prized possessions is a solid brass 100th anniversary paperweight issued by Stearns & Foster in 1946. He also loves a beer stein that Ernie Wuliger's Ohio-Sealy company issued in 1983 to celebrate a Sealy trip to Switzerland. "I found that at a flea market and it was in excellent condition, so I bought it," Chase said.
The oldest ad in his portfolio is for Ostermoor, a major bedding player in its day. That ad dates to 1898. "They were the Sealy of their day," he said. "They should have been Sealy."
But today Ostermoor is just an historical footnote, and the company that originally made mattresses in Sealy, Texas, has grown to become the world's largest bedding producer.
Ostermoor employed some marketing strategies that were sophisticated for their time, Chase noted. The company listed a different street number on Elizabeth Street in New York City, where it was located, for each publication where its ads ran. For example, the ads in The Cosmopolitan listed the street address as 111 Elizabeth St., while the ads in McClure's listed 112 Elizabeth St., and ads in The Atlantic Monthly listed 114 Elizabeth St. as the company's address.
All of those were street addresses where the company was located, so it could tell, by the address on the mail it received, how much response was generated by each publication.
Chase said Simmons is his second-favorite vintage bed advertiser. His study of vintage ads has led him to this conclusion: "Simmons has done more to promote bedding than any other company."
He is constantly struck by the fact that features seen in bedding today were being promoted many years ago. He cites airbeds, heated mattress tops and pillowtops as just three examples.
He also says the mattress ads illustrate the social conventions of the day. For years, Chase said, couples were not pictured in bed together; they were in separate twin beds. He said that it was not until the 1970s that couples were shown in the same bed.
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