Trzcinski wins with factory-direct model
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, January 27, 2008
Cleveland — CLEVELAND — In his first run in the bedding industry, Ron Trzcinski joined an established company, worked here in his hometown, and rose through the ranks to the No. 2 job at the industry's No. 1 producer. He spent 18 years there.
In his second run, he stayed in Cleveland, established his own bedding company, and helped build it to one of the largest players in its field. He has spent 17 years there.
Trzcinski just can't get the bedding bug out of his system. He continues to be an influential figure in the industry that first attracted him after he received an MBA from the University of Virginia in the early 1970s and took stock of the job offers that greeted him.
These days, he is president of The Original Mattress Factory, one of the nation's leading factory-direct operators, with 11 factories and almost 100 factory stores in nine states on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
Despite the catchy name, this isn't the original mattress factory — those have been around for centuries, after all — but the company does embody Trzcinski's original and enduring beliefs that mattresses should be produced and sold honestly and fairly.
With almost 40 years in the industry, he says Original Mattress has prospered with a long-range commitment to quality. Rather than generating quick sales with low-quality products (a short-term fix, he says), Original Mattress is focused on providing products with real value, according to Trzcinski.
"This is not a short-term vision," he said the other day in an interview at his headquarters. "I won't be gone in a month or a year. We want to sell a product that will stay sold. From the day we opened, we have avoided selling a ton of pillowtop beds at $399. Would those be a value to the consumer? We want to be an example of how a company should be run. We have tried to avoid the sizzle part of the business and instead sell the steak."
At Original Mattress, the steaks are innerspring beds.
"We believe in innersprings," Trzcinski said. The company has been experimenting with memory foam for years, he said, "but we don't have a product we can sell you and you will be happy with."
Trzcinski knows what goes into a quality mattress. He's dismayed to see the shortcuts some companies take with their bedding, and he makes sure that Original Mattress keeps the quality of its products high.
Most of the company's beds are two-sided, a type of construction Trzcinski says offers more durability and better feels than the single-sided beds that now dominate the bedding market. Two-sided beds are better for consumers, he maintains.
Original Mattress also continues to use cotton pads inside its mattresses.
"We truly believe cotton is the best," Trzcinski said. "We are trying to make the best bed we can. That is what drives us. We are not looking to cut costs. We ask, 'How can we make the bed better?'"
Thinking of cotton takes him back to the early days of Original Mattress. "When I left Sealy and opened this company, it was great to smell cotton again," he said.
Original Mattress doesn't just talk about quality; it demonstrates it in its factories. "We want you to tour our factory," the company says on its Web site (www.originalmattress.com), "because when you understand the process of building a mattress and box spring, you can make an informed decision to purchase. We have cut-away models of our mattresses and their brand-name counterparts, so you can compare feature for feature and know exactly what you're getting for your money."
The Web site also has a clever "Journey to the center of the factory" page that lets consumers take a virtual tour. Did you know that the tape edge operator, who has one of the most difficult jobs in the factory, walks a mile backwards in the course of a day's work? That's one of the insights shared on the virtual tour.
The company remains on a growth track. The Original Mattress formula has worked in every market the company has entered, but Trzcinski says there is no master growth plan in place.
There wasn't one when he entered the bedding business, either. He recalled that as a freshly minted MBA he had a number of prestigious offers, but decided to cast his lot with Ohio-Sealy Mattress Co., an aggressive licensee in the Sealy organization headed by savvy executive Ernie Wuliger. It was a wise choice.
Trzcinski helped build Sealy into the nation's largest bedding producer and learned the industry inside and out. He was a confidant and partner of Wuliger, becoming president and chief operating officer of Ohio Mattress, as it came to be known, in 1982. He was only 37.
He and Wuliger saw Ohio Mattress gain control of the Sealy organization in the late 1980s. After a leveraged buyout of Sealy, "new attitudes and business philosophies" caused him to leave Sealy and strike out on his own, he said.
He hasn't looked back since.
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