Magniflex: Setting the gold standard
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, August 31, 2008
NEW YORK — Italian bedding producer Magniflex is setting the gold standard in the high-end mattress marketplace. And, for that matter, it's also setting the silver standard. Not to mention the platinum standard. Those standards all have something in common. More on that in a moment.
Italy's leading bedding producer, a specialty sleep specialist, first grabbed headlines a few years ago with a bed fashioned from 22-karat gold fibers. That bed sprang from the mind of Marco Magni, global sales director and a member of the founding Magni family. Impressed by the vast wealth he saw on trips to the Mideast, he wondered how to appeal to those discriminating consumers.
Magniflex, which utilizes a variety of exotic fibers and materials for its mattress covers (corn, bamboo, crab shells, seaweed and tree fibers, to name a few), began experimenting with gold fibers. We're talking real gold, the 22-karat variety.
The company found that gold fibers possess antistatic and antimicrobial properties, and promote a cool sleep surface. After much trial and error, the Magniflex gold mattress was unveiled, retailing at $25,000 in a queen-sized sleep set. An accompanying gold-fiber pillow retails for $1,000, more than the average mattress retails for in the United States.
Where there is gold, silver is sure to follow. And Magniflex was able to offer a more affordable sleep set with a model covered with ticking fashioned from silver threads, which share many of the qualities of gold fibers. The silver sleep set retails at $4,000.
Looking to further push the price envelope, Magniflex began experimenting with platinum fibers, building on the consumer benefits of precious metals. Earlier this year, in the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas, Magniflex introduced its Platinum collection, with a queen-sized sleep set hitting the $75,000 price. That is the most expensive and luxurious sleep set in the world, Magniflex officials contend.
“In addition to being unreservedly comfortable,” Magni said of the new collection, “each piece is naturally thermo-regulating, anti-bacterial, odor-proof and anti-stress.”
Magniflex runs a retail store in New York's Soho district, but relies on its growing U.S. retail network for most of its sales.
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