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David Perry

Retail bedding research gives furniture stores key insights

Furniture stores that want to improve mattress sales can benefit by borrowing the playbook of the category’s kingpins: bedding specialty stores. 

That’s one of the key points we made in our summary of Furniture/Today’s latest retail bedding research. This research, which represents the views of retailers operating more than 2,000 stores, documents some key differences between furniture stores and bedding specialty stores. (Click here to see the exclusive research report.)

Since the bedding specialists are the fastest-growing channel of distribution, they have obviously found a formula for retail success. 

You’ll find a comprehensive summary of our retail bedding research in the report. The findings are instructive. Among the key differences between furniture stores and bedding specialty stores: Specialists promote bedding more aggressively and frequently, do a better job with specialty sleep and are more committed to sleep accessories. 

The aggressive promotion begins with sharper starting price points. The specialists typically open their innerspring bedding at $199, versus $399 for furniture stores. They start their memory foam at $899, $100 less than furniture stores’ opening price point for that key category, and they kick off their latex bedding at $1,199, a full $500 less than the opening price point in that category for furniture stores. All of those prices are medians, and are benchmarked to queen-sized sleep sets. 

It’s not just that the bedding specialists are touting lower prices. The specialists also are promoting more aggressively in newspaper and TV ads. Tellingly, 55% of bedding specialists use weekly newspaper ads, compared with just 36% of furniture stores. And 4% of the specialists advertise daily in the newspaper, compared with less than 1% of furniture stores. The specialists are also more committed to daily TV ads and make more use of Internet ads. 

We also asked bedding retailers about their product mix and found they are doing a much better job with sleep accessories than are furniture stores. Since accessories boost retail profits and give consumers more comfort, they are a very important component of the overall bedding mix. 

Specialists also are more committed to specialty sleep, which typically sells at premium price points. Specifically, they have a higher percentage of sales in the latex, air, adjustable and futon categories. Overall, furniture stores reported that 73% of their sales are in the innerspring segment, compared with 59% for bedding specialty stores.
Furniture stores that want to grow bedding business should carefully study the retail bedding research report in this issue. The keys to success in bedding are right there, just waiting to be put to use. 

Our thanks to Sealy for sponsoring our presentation on the research at the Bedding Conference a few weeks ago, and for sponsoring the special section in this issue.