‘Whale of a tale’ launches new bedding retail feature

Call me Dave.
The inspiration for that lead comes from the place where one of the most famous opening lines of fiction was written: "Call me Ishmael." And that place, in case you don't know, is Pittsfield, Mass., where Herman Melville lived a century and a half ago when he wrote his masterpiece, "Moby-Dick."
These literary footnotes help me introduce a new feature in Furniture/Today: Retail Bedding Playbook. The feature, which will appear 26 times this year, launches in this issue. (click here to see it)
The idea for the feature stems from the theme of our upcoming Bedding Conference, set for May 4-6 at the Fairmont Turnberry Isle in Aventura, Fla.: Polishing the Playbook: Skill Sets for Retail Bedding Success. We all know that success in the mattress business ultimately hinges on what happens on retail sales floors across the country, and that's why we make retail bedding profiles a regular part of our bedding coverage.
With Retail Bedding Playbook, we will continue to visit bedding retailers around the country. We will also take an analytical look at key performance measures in the industry, and we will tackle key retail issues. Our goal is to look at some of the winning retail strategies and philosophies driving bedding business.
While some of the retailers we visit will be well known to you, some will be fresh faces with interesting stories to tell. And that's why we begin this journey together in Pittsfield, where a full-line furniture store named Paul Rich & Sons looms large on the scene. That retailer has expanded five times in its 27-year history.
And, at a time when business is challenging for many bedding retailers, Paul Rich & Sons has a thriving bedding business. We will take a look at some of the keys to its bedding success in the first two installments of Retail Bedding Playbook.
Before you read those features, you might be interested to know that Tom Rich, a principal in Paul Rich & Sons, lives right around the corner from Melville's former home, Arrowhead. "His house is a tourist site, so Herman is still going strong around here," Rich told me. He read "Moby-Dick" years ago, and calls it "quite a good story." He's right about that.
In the spirit of that great novel, we would note that Paul Rich & Sons has a "whale of a tale" to report with its mattress department. We hope you enjoy our visit with Paul Rich & Sons and the other retailers we will introduce to you later this year. And so our retail bedding journey begins as a new year dawns. We hope this is a great year for you.