Stylution expands business model
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, September 29, 2008
BARRINGTON, Ill. — Stylution International, a major Chinese mattress producer with a U.S. sales office here, is expanding its business model to add greater emphasis to its growing OEM program.
The company, which operates a state-of-the-art mattress factory in Dongguan, China, is now looking for U.S. bedding producers to partner with on the manufacture of promotional bedding for the U.S. market. Stylution will continue to ship its medium-priced and high-end mattress models into the U.S. market, said Jack Chen, chairman of Stylution International. Those lines will carry the Stylution name or will be private label.
Stylution will work with manufacturers in the U.S. as an OEM supplier of both finished goods and components.
“We would manufacture mattresses under their brand names,” Chen said.
He said it is too expensive for Chinese producers to make promotional bedding in China and ship it into the U.S. market. “There is little advantage to produce Bonnell mattresses in China,” Chen said.
Chen said Stylution, which recently added a foam-pouring operation to its campus in Dongguan, is well positioned to meet U.S. retailers' needs for better goods. Stylution's bedding plant includes 46 encased coil machines, 32 tape edge machines and 16 quilting machines, he said. The foam plant makes conventional and visco-elastic foams, he said.
Ed Scott, president of Stylution USA, the U.S. sales arm of Stylution International, said the new OEM strategy is being tested successfully in the United States.
“At Stylution,” he said, “we specialize in high-end products and we offer quality, value and good service. We are different from other Chinese producers, who make cheap products.”
Stylution has experimented with compressed bedding for sale at promotional price points, but has not recommended those products for U.S. retailers, Scott said. “While visco-elastic beds compress and recover well and the post-compression performance of those products is fine,” he said, “we have not been pleased with the post-compression aesthetics of the innerspring products.”
The company has emphasized beds retailing at $999 and up.
Scott offered this assessment of Stylution's business in the U.S.: “We continue to grow, although we have not been immune to the current economic downturn, coupled with the weakening dollar. Fortunately, the vertically integrated nature of our business has mitigated to some degree the rising raw material costs being experienced worldwide.”
New from Stylution are a number of sculpted and ventilated visco-elastic beds allowing for increased air flow and providing a cooler sleeping surface. “That is one example of the type of innovation available to our customers because of our vertical integration,” Scott said. The new beds retail from $799 to $1,499.
