Uneasy Sleep

There’s a lot for furniture retailers to love about mattresses, starting with higher margins than most tables and chairs. Plus, mattresses are easy to stack in a warehouse and can be delivered in a matter of hours. Finally, a shopper with a sore back is usually in a hurry for a bed that can help, even during periods when Wall Street isn’t hitting record highs.

For all these reasons, furniture stores aren’t just lamenting the loss of mattress sales to sleep chains, they’re finally doing something about it. Mattress-only stores have seen their share of the business grow from 19 percent in 1990 to more than 40 percent today, according to Jerry Epperson of Mann, Armistead & Epperson.

Tired of losing sales to  sleep-only stores in the Rochester, Minn., area, Jim Sather of Furniture Superstore acted by opening a 3,000-square-foot America’s Mattress store in a high-traffic location three blocks away from his full-line store. The separate sleep shop—dedicated entirely to the Serta brand—opened 1.5 years ago and quickly out-paced the sales of Furniture Superstore’s mattress department, which has the same mattress lineup as the newer sleep store.

“What we found is that there’s a segment of the population that prefers to shop at specialty stores, whether it’s for coffee or batteries or a mattress,” Sather said. “They want to go to sleep shops for mattresses (because) they think they’ll get more expertise and better pricing.”

COMPETING AGAINST YOURSELF INSTEAD OF ‘MEGA-MATTRESS’
He said opening the America’s Mattress store enabled his company to gain market share, adding, “When you add a store to compete against yourself, you’re able to achieve more.”

Another benefit opening the Serta-only store is it enabled Furniture Superstore to buy many items at the same prices that bigger rivals in the region pay.

“Even though we’re a mom-and-pop store, we have the same buying power, and that’s a big advantage,” Sather said.

Furniture Superstore is part of a growing trend. Later this year, the 30-store Art Van Furniture chain plans to open six to 10 stand-alone mattress stores in smaller Michigan cities where it doesn’t currently operate. The goals, according to President Gary Van Elslander include staking a claim to markets that sleep chains may covet while building on Art Van Furniture’s strength in bedding. “Looking at the market and how people are shopping for (mattresses), there seems to be some desire on the part of the customer to shop in a specialty store, and we feel we can fit in (specialty stores) between our existing locations to really build on what is already a dominant market-share position in bedding,” Van Elslander said.