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David Perry

Better sleep crusade gets a boost

FINAL TOUR UPDATE: It’s the week after our exciting national retail bedding tour came to an end. I spent virtually every waking hour last week with a team of sleep and bedding experts, and I am much the better for the experience.

The tour, arranged by Leggett & Platt, took me to five bedding retailers, including three retailers that Furniture/Today has named Retail Giants of Bedding. The other two are strong candidates for that honor.

There is no substitute for being on the road. The insights you get from visiting stores are very different from those you get by reading an e-mail from a company executive. The learning process is magnified ten-fold when you walk the sales floor and talk with the men and women who sell mattresses for a living, and when you sit down with top company executives and talk about their challenges and their hopes for their companies.

The tour, which L&P called its Spring Alive Tour, gave me access to some of the top bedding retailers in the country: Mattress Firm, Verlo Mattress Factory Stores, The Original Mattress Factory, Mattress Giant and Sit ’n Sleep. I’ve got a notebook full of insights on selling better sleep and selling more mattresses, and I’ll be sharing them with you in stories that will run in the weeks and months to come.

The tour was the brainchild of L&P bedding executive Mark Quinn, who assembled a team of bedding experts to help educate the retailers we called upon. Craig McAndrews of Innovative Retail Group, an expert on the mattress shopping experience, talked convincingly about the advantages of moving from a mattress expert to becoming a sleep expert. And Kurt Ling, president of Customer Kinetics, gave us invaluable insights into the minds of bedding consumers when he led consumer focus groups throughout the week.

That trio — Quinn, McAndrews and Ling — provided the spark each day of our bedding crusade. They worked together seamlessly, each contributing in his own way. It was a collegial group, one that I joined as an observer.

As the tour wound down last week, we spent some time in the plane talking about what it all meant. We used words like “passion” and “pride” and “commitment.” This could be the start of something very important for the industry, we concluded.

“If you want to take on a very big issue and make it your personal mission,” Quinn said later, “then make sure that you surround yourself with team members who share your passion for the project. If those people end up being good friends of yours, then you are truly blessed.”

Despite the name of the tour, it wasn’t focused on pushing innerspring bedding. Some retailers expected a strong pitch on the advantages of innerspring bedding, but they didn’t get that. Instead, they got insights into the importance of selling better sleep. And Quinn and the members of his team got first-hand insights into consumer and retail views of the mattress shopping experience.

“No matter what you do,” Quinn said, “if you place the customer at the center of it you will be hard-pressed to get it wrong.” He’s right about that.

The columns in this series that you will find linked to this piece were written from the road. As I look them over today, from the vantage point of my office in Greensboro, N.C., I think they capture some of the excitement that we experienced on that national retail bedding tour.

Yes, there are exciting things happening in the world of mattresses. And the opportunities that lie ahead are plentiful. Let’s all work together to sell better sleep.