By: Dale T. Read
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
 

Helping You, the Mattress Retailer, to Know More About Mattresses and the Companies That Make Them

From day one, over 12 years ago (as BEDROOM Magazine begins its 13th year of publishing with this Vol.13, No1.), we set out to educate you the mattress/bedding retailer about the products, the marketing messages and the company information pertaining to bedding/mattress/sleep surface manufacturers and suppliers. We have been unapologetic about it, and defined our mission as providing you the retailer with as much detailed product and mattress company and component information as we possibly could in a quarterly magazine. We NEVER wanted to teach you how to sell sleep or how to deal with consumers. (Done very well by another magazine.) We never wanted to tell you the latest news (We have a small news section, but that job is handled much better by other parties). And we most assuredly NEVER wanted to report about rugs, lamps, accessories, case goods, upholstery, dining room, outdoor or textiles not related to the top of the bed. We have been about mattresses, beds and top of bed only: innerspring beds (luxury and low-end, machine made and hand-tied, synthetic and all-natural materials), airbeds, waterbeds, latex beds, visco-elastic beds, gel beds, adjustable beds and top-of-bed products covers, sheets, pillows, comforters, duvets and spreads. Now we will be adding sleeper sofas, convertible beds and futons (more about that in a minute.)

As new and old materials and technologies have been perfected (latex, visco-elastic, gel, soy-based, air barrier technology, natural oils, silk, cotton, bamboo, etc.), we created four departments within BEDROOM Magazine to help educate you the retailer. The section dealing with the whole variety of mattress manufacturers is called "About the Beds". These stories cover product, marketing and company information from the largest bedding/mattress manufacturer down to the smallest one-factory local manufacturer.

As consumers have become more aware of visco-elastic temperature-responsive foam, latex, adjustable, air core technology and other innovations, we discovered that retailers, especially buyers, want to know more and more about what manufacturers are putting under the hood…so we created the section, "What’s in the Bed" to educate you about the materials and technologies of what is being placed inside the SKU’s you are ordering from your manufacturers. Our thinking has been, the more you know about the product, the better.

Mattress retailers selling higher priced beds are also becoming increasingly aware of the opportunity to add a few more profit dollars by selling top-of-bed products. When a dealer sells a $1200 or $2400 dollar mattress and foundation, it seems only logical for them to also sell a visco-elastic, latex, synthetic feather or down or some other all-natural pillow along with higher quality sheets, comforters, duvets, etc. Recognizing that many bedding retailers want to expand their fashioned-based top-of-bed department, we added our, "What’s on the Bed" when the Las Vegas market first opened.

daler@rtppub.com