Survey says: Many stores carry 3 or 4 bedding lines
David Perry -- Furniture Today, December 5, 2011
HIGH POINT - The magic number for mattress retailing is three.
OK, that's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but there is some truth in that statement, which we will explain in just a moment.
But first we want to introduce a new series of Retail Bedding Playbook reports, one that is based on the results of a bedding retailer survey that we recently conducted. The online survey got the views of retailers on our Top 100 Furniture Stores list and on our list of Beyond the Top 100 Furniture Stores. Collectively our respondents operate 615 storefronts and more than half have annual sales of $10 million or more.
We asked them a variety of questions about their bedding businesses, starting with a basic question: How many bedding suppliers do you carry?
The winning answer was three to four, cited by fully half of the respondents. The median number of suppliers carried is three, and it's on that figure that we based our opening statement about three being the magic number for mattress retailing.
There are many paths to success in mattress retailing, as we have noted on a number of occasions in our bedding reporting. But there is a power to three, the power to be right in the middle of the pack in terms of the number of bedding lines you carry. And keep in mind that the respondents in this survey are among the strongest furniture and bedding retailers in the country. That's not a bad crowd to be in the middle of.
Yet we do have to also note that almost half of the retailers we surveyed are on either side of that three to four bedding line divide: 21% carry one to two lines, while 23% carry five to six and 5% carry seven or more. Which camp are you in?
Which camp do you want to be in?
Number of bedding suppliers carrled | |
Median number of suppliers carrlect: 3 | |
1 to 2 | 21% |
3 to 40 | 51% |
5 to 6 | 23% |
7 or more | 5% |
Source: Furniture/Today Bedding Retailer Survey, 2011 | |
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