Sleep to Live bedding line proves hot for Kingsdown
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, December 7, 2009
RALEIGH, N.C. — Kingsdown's Sleep to Live product line, launched earlier this year, is off to a sizzling start, company officials say.
The line, backed by the Sleep to Live diagnostic selling system and a new retail selling program, is now on the floor in about 1,600 stores across the country. By the end of next year, the company aims to expand the line to 2,000 stores.
“Sleep to Live is the hottest thing in the market right now,” said Eric Hinshaw, CEO of Mebane, N.C.-based Kingsdown, a Top 10 bedding producer. “Talk to the top retailers and they will tell you same thing.”
The line, introduced at the Las Vegas Market in February, began shipping to retailers in April. Shipments of the Sleep to Live line are currently running 26% ahead of the former line, Hinshaw said. And that is at a time when overall industry sales are down sharply.
The line made a soft launch here in the fall of 2008, when Kingsdown opened four Sleep to Live stores in this market. The stores featured an interactive retail shopping experience, complete with a virtual retail sales associate, Internet stations, diagnostic kiosks, and a variety of sleep-related accessories.
Kingsdown officials used the stores as retail laboratories. “We learned how the consumer reacts to the concept,” Hinshaw said. “We were afraid the consumer would be turned off when we talked about mattresses. In the right environment, they aren't.”
The Sleep to Live stores aim to change consumer perceptions about mattresses, elevating them from a commodity image to that of technological and scientific products that deliver health benefits.
Houston-based Mattress Firm, a major customer of Kingsdown, has taken over operations of three of the four Raleigh-area stores. The retailer began by testing the program and then decided to roll it out in all of its stores. Hinshaw said it made sense to turn the three stores over to Mattress Firm, because Kingsdown didn't want to compete with the dealer in the market.
Kingsdown still operates Sleep to Live stores in Mebane, a town west of Raleigh that is the company's home base, and in Southpoint, a shopping center in the Durham area.
Hinshaw said that now that Mattress Firm is operating some of the stores, other retailers can see how the Sleep to Live concept can be applied in multi-vendor showrooms, an approach that a number of retailers will embrace, he predicted.
“The Sleep to Live type of concept, particularly the store-within-a-store, has much greater viability than I thought a year ago,” Hinshaw said. “It proved itself here and in other locations.”
Kingsdown learned from the test stores how to reduce the costs of building out the stores, thereby increasing the appeal of the program, said Frank Hood, senior vice president at Kingsdown. He called the process “value engineering with market scale.”
The former Sleep to Live store at North Hills here is now a Mattress Firm store, with about 40% of the floor still devoted to Sleep to Live products. The main diagnostic pod remains in place, as does the virtual sales associate, “Chryssie,” who welcomes shoppers to the store and leads them to the test pod.
Hood said Kingsdown will be “taking Chryssie to the next level” with a new Sleep to Live retail concept to be unveiled at the Las Vegas Market next February. Kingsdown will again be showing at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
Asked if the Sleep to Live program is changing the way consumers shop for mattresses, Hinshaw responded: “I hope so. We need consumers to view our products as aspirational, something they want to have, and not waiting until they need to have them.
“We need consumers to think of our products technologically and scientifically, and not just as a passive item,” he added. “If we have those two factors, we have an opportunity to talk to consumers before they need our products. And that is a much better time to talk to consumers, because they say they hate the mattress-buying process. When they hate the process, they will put up psychological walls that will be difficult to breach.”
Hinshaw said that once consumers put up those walls, they aren't likely to listen to retail sales associates. And that makes it harder to talk about issues like health, wellness, science and technology, he said.
Approximately 80% of Kingsdown's product line has been shifted to the Sleep to Live brand. All of the company's former Body Diagnostics systems in stores have been switched to the new Sleep to Live format, according to Hinshaw.
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