Stylution offers Chinese bedding
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, July 9, 2006
Dongguan, China — Dongguan, China— A massive new mattress factory here, operated by a savvy veteran of the Asian bedding scene, is poised to make its mark in the U.S. bedding arena.
Chinese-made mattresses have only a limited U.S. presence now, but that could be changing, officials of Stylution said here.
Part of the reason why is the gleaming new four-story mattress and upholstery factory here on the 1 million-square-foot Stylution campus. With 450,000 square feet devoted to mattress and upholstery production, it dwarfs its U.S. counterparts.
The factory is the brainchild of hard-charging Jack Chen, Stylution International's chairman. He has a lofty goal, emblazoned on a banner on the side of the building: To be the No. 1 manufacturer of international brand mattresses.
The factory — Building D on the well-ordered Stylution campus — is yet another chapter in Chen's continuing growth story. He established Stylution in Taiwan in 1973, set up a factory in the furniture heartland of China in Guangdong Province in 1996, moved to a bigger, better Dongguan location in 2003, and completed an expansion of the mattress and upholstery factory this past March.
The new plant is currently producing 2,000 pieces of bedding per day, with a goal of double that amount. It has the ability to ship 50,000 mattresses per month to the United States, with retails ranging from $599 to about $1,999.
That will make the factory, four times bigger than the average U.S. mattress plant, a strong player in the U.S. bedding market, according to Ed Scott, the longtime U.S. bedding executive who heads U.S. operations for Stylution.
"Every customer who has bought one container from us has come back and bought two," Scott said, "and customers who have bought two containers have come back and bought three. This business is on the upswing. While Chinese-made mattresses haven't exploded onto the scene thus far, that doesn't mean they won't show a lot of growth in the U.S."
In fact, said Scott, seated in the new 100,000-square-foot administrative building here that Stylution recently opened with an elaborate ribbon-cutting ceremony, Chinese-made mattresses will be a force that cannot be denied. Within four years, he predicts, Chinese mattresses could account for 25% of the dollar value of bedding shipments in the U.S. market. That figure is currently in the low single digits, bedding insiders believe.
But Scott, who has almost two dozen trips to China under his belt, including his latest one last month, says Chinese bedding imports are ready to take off.
"Once this starts kicking in," he said, "our numbers will explode. Retailers have been conservative thus far. There has been a wait-and-see attitude about Chinese beds. Now they are starting to believe. It will happen, and retailers can take advantage of China. The early adopters will reap the greatest rewards. As retailers have success, that success will spawn more success."
Building D, staffed by 400 employees who wear blue shirts to promote a sense of unity among the workforce, features the best mattress-making equipment from around the world and is the beneficiary of a much lower cost of doing business in China versus the United States, company officials said.
"Most retailers tell us they are paying 22% to 28% less than for locally delivered bedding," Scott said.
Much lower labor costs — less than 50% of average labor costs in U.S. mattress factories — and lower prices for raw materials combine with the overall lower cost of doing business in China to provide a substantial pricing edge for Stylution, Scott said. Those savings far exceed the costs of shipping beds from China to the United States, he added.
A hard-working, well-managed employee base, skillfully leveraging an efficient, state-of-the-art mattress factory, provides another edge, according to Scott.
Chen has been making mattresses for decades (he is Restonic's and Musterring's licensee for Asia) and is a major player in the Asian bedding market. He said the sprawling mattress factory is designed to meet the high standards required of successful U.S. bedding lines.
Stylution has 250 dealers in China and is one of China's largest producers of medium-priced and high-end mattresses. Chen has 33 years of bedding experience, 23 of that as a Restonic licensee, and 18 years as a licensee for the German-owned Musterring brand.
"Therefore," Chen said, "we may say that Stylution knows the mattress culture of Europe and the U.S. This is one of the ways we are different from other Chinese mattress factories. Ed Scott is an expert from the mattress industry. I am also an expert. We understand the mattress culture in the U.S. The Stylution factory is a U.S. factory."
The factory, which has gained ISO 9001 certification, drew rave reviews from a visiting delegation of U.S. bedding producers, and from an American businessman based in China who regularly visits Chinese manufacturing facilities.
"Stylution has put a lot of thought into where they want to grow in international markets," said John Chen (no relation to Jack), who heads China operations for his U.S.-based consulting and sourcing company. "Stylution has also made a significant investment in facilities and people, more so than other companies I've seen in China.
"On the manufacturing side, they have some of the best flow technology I've seen," he continued. "They have built a foundation that is very scalable very quickly."
It is a foundation that is strong enough to reach halfway around the world to service the U.S. mattress market with a value-priced line, Stylution officials believe.
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Stylution offers Chinese bedding
Jul 20, 2006
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