Relaxed mood, sales approach winning customers for Ergo
David Perry, Bedding editor -- Furniture Today, September 14, 2009
IRVINE, Calif. — Soothing music greets customers who enter Ergo Customized Comfort here. The specialty sleep sets just inside the door are nicely accessorized.
“This is an opportunity for our customers to get comfortable while they are testing a mattress,” said Michael Nermon, the conductor of the sleep shop experience at Ergo. He has chosen “spa music” to welcome consumers and help them relax.
The thoroughfares outside the store in The Shops at Park Place here hum with traffic all day long, but Nermon, president of Ergo, wants his customers to slow down when they enter his tightly edited sleep shop, where just 14 beds await testing.
Sales are up these days at Ergo. “We aren't trying to be all things to all people,” Nermon said, seeking to explain his success. “We are appealing to more educated consumers looking for healthier sleep products, alternatives to conventional beds.”
And the company is honest with its customers. “We are an oasis in a sea of retail madness,” Nermon said. “There is a lot of trickery in the market. There are artificial markdowns.”
Ergo focuses on selling better sleep, taking the time to build rapport with its customers and introducing them to beds designed to meet their specific sleep needs. Nermon calls it “consultative selling.” Long-time Southern California mattress retailer Jeff Scorziell, now president of Anatomic Global, one of Ergo's vendors, says the sales associates at Ergo know the beds they sell. “Your team really knows its stuff,” Scorziell said to Nermon the other day during a visit to his store.
The four innerspring and 10 specialty beds at Ergo retail from $599 to $7,000. Vendors include Tempur-Pedic, Anatomic Global (which makes a private label line for Ergo), Natura, Silhouette, Keetsa and Aireloom.
The sales staff focuses on fitting their customers to the right bed. “We try to focus customers on their own bodies and how the bed fits them,” Nermon said. “Whether it is a mattress or a pillow, we are all about the fit.”
Consumers these days are not as quick to make buying decisions, according to Nermon. “So many retailers think that if a customer walks, they will never see them again,” he said. “We respect their need to have space and to do more research if they want to.”
Ergo eschews the sparse specification sheets that many retailers attach to their beds. Instead, the retailer puts the specifications — and the prices — in binders that resemble restaurant menus. “We strive not to look like a mattress store,” Nermon said. “We don't hide prices, but they aren't in our customers' faces.”
The binders also have information on product benefits. One of the Ergo beds, for example, is described as offering “eco-friendly hybrid memory foam with nine times the airflow of the original formulation. You can be kind to the environment and to yourself.”
Ergo was an early supporter of memory foam, and displays those beds in an attractive gallery setting. “These beds do live up to people's expectations,” Nermon said. “We have been selling them for eight years and we are seeing an emerging repeat business. Customers are now buying them for their kids.”
Sleep accessories also have their place at Ergo. Pillows, retailing from $75 to about $250, are by Tempur-Pedic, Natura and Oxygen Pillow, in addition to the company's own line. “We are having good success with pillows,” Nermon said.
While many retailers are struggling in this challenging business climate, Nermon says bedding retailers have some advantages.
“Everybody is still sleeping,” he said. “Everybody needs a better night of sleep.… A good night's rest is essential to life. There is no single factor you have control over that will make a bigger difference for you than your mattress.”
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