Mattress Retailing 101: Bedding plays major role in Furniture Mart’s success
Focus on customer care, support
David Perry -- Furniture Today, August 15, 2008
ROXBORO, N.C. — Larry Cole has found success with bedding at his full-line furniture store here with a simple strategy: Promote bedding relentlessly.
And that’s no baloney, says Cole, the owner of Furniture Mart here. Actually, baloney does play a part in his retailing success. We are talking real baloney, folks. More on that later.
Furniture Mart, a 24,000-square-foot store in this central North Carolina city (population: 12,000), has been selling furniture and bedding for decades. Cole has been the owner for 33 years, and he says bedding is a star performer on his floor. “Mattresses are probably 30% of my business,” he noted. “We do a big bedding business.”
How?
“It’s persistence,” Cole responded. “We promote bedding as much as any product in the store. Every ad that we do includes bedding. Even if it’s a Lane or a La-Z-Boy ad, we include bedding in it.”
Don’t customers tire of all those bedding ads? No, Cole says. And there’s a reason for that. “My theory,” he said, “is that I don’t care how many times you say something is on sale. Until the consumer needs it, they don’t hear it.” When the customer is in the market for bedding, those bedding ads suddenly hit home.
“We have a sale everyday,” Cole added, “so whenever the customer is ready, we are, too.”
Furniture Mart has two dozen sets of bedding on its floor. Its vendors include Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, Comfortaire and Bemco, the producer which has been a staple in the store from its earliest days, and still performs well. The sleep sets retail from $299 to $3,699.
For years, Furniture Mart carried only Bemco bedding, produced by that maker’s Dunn, N.C.-based factory. “We’ve been a Bemco dealer from the git-go,” Cole said. “We have promoted it well enough that people know the name Bemco as well as people out of town know Sealy.”
Several years ago, Furniture Mart added other brands to its mix. “We have multiple brands in one location for the customer to compare,” he said. “We want them to find what they want and not shop around.”
Cole, a regular on the sales floor, sells beds by selling the comfort they offer. “The reason we have all these beds is that we are selling comfort. We can show you the comfort in each bed.”
That’s a change from the way Furniture Mart used to sell beds, Cole noted. “When I first started selling beds,” he said, “customers wanted hard, firm beds. Now the industry has finally figured out that they need a bed that is comfortable. That has happened in the last five years. Comfort is very important now. Every time I speak about beds I speak about comfort.”
Another change at Furniture Mart is that the beds now offer open-flame protection, as mandated by a federal standard. “When we bring that feature to our customers’ attention, they appreciate it,” Cole said. “If they want to buy a mattress only, we explain that their old box spring isn’t (FR) protected.”
Cole said the new FR standard gives the industry a chance to sell more mattresses. “We could sell more beds if consumers replaced all the beds in their home (with FR-protected beds),” he said. “They probably need replacing anyway. Now there is a safety reason to replace the bed.”
Many consumers hang on to their old beds for far longer than they should, according to Cole: “I could go in 10 homes and eight would need a new set of bedding. People come in and say, ‘I’ve had my mattress for 30 or 40 years.’ I hear that more than you might think.”
Furniture Mart touts its constant sales with in-store signage, daily print ads and ads on radio. And it is with that radio advertising that we return to the baloney.
Cole has attracted a wide following with a live remote broadcast from the store every Thursday morning from 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. He talks about everything from furniture and bedding to community events. And, as a special treat, he sometimes fires up his grill and cooks baloney burgers. They consist of a thick slice of baloney served on a toasted bun with mustard and cooked onions.
The customers love the fare. “We will serve anywhere from 80 to 100 baloney burgers,” Cole said. “That is a bunch of baloney.” He says that with a straight face.
The baloney burgers have become a local institution. They are paired with desserts that townspeople bring Cole, such as lemon pies, banana pudding, chocolate cake and strawberry pudding.
Taking care of your customers is the key to any successful business, Cole observed. “You’ve got to make customers appreciate what you’ve done for them and their family,” he said. “That has kept us in business. We will look after them.”
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Bedding plays major role in Furniture Mart’s success
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