White Dove CEO Bruce Goodman, left, inspects a mattress that will be donated to the Cleveland Furniture Bank. The Newburgh Heights manufacturer is donating 100 twin mattresses to the Cleveland Furniture Bank’s Beds for Kids initiative to commemorate its 100th anniversary.

As a century-old, fourth-generation company, White Dove Mattress is a rarity. Very few companies overall — some estimates suggest less than 1% — make it to their 100th birthday, and only 3% of family-owned businesses are operating at the fourth-generation level.

What makes the Newburgh Heights manufacturer's story more compelling, however, is that it is not only surviving but thriving in a highly concentrated and increasingly competitive market.

White Dove CEO Bruce Goodman said a handful of familiar brands, including Serta, Sealy, Simmons and Tempur-Pedic, dominate just over 80% of the U.S. mattress industry, which market watchers peg at around $17.3 billion.

That leaves less than 20% for the "couple of hundred" smaller players, he added, including fast-growing bed-in-box online retailers.

"Still, we've grown pretty significantly in the last three or four years," Goodman said. "Probably a good 50%-60% (revenue growth), and we've done it with rising raw material and labor costs."

Goodman's great-grandfather, H. Goodman, and grandfather founded the mattress maker in 1922. Both men were working at a regional Sealy plant when they left to form their own business.

Located early on at East 131st Street in Cleveland, White Dove came into prominence in the 1940s and '50s by putting a layer of body-forming foam cushion on one side of its innerspring mattresses.

"We were one of the first, if not quite possibly the first, manufacturers in the country that made a one-sided mattress at a time when everybody was making two-sided," Goodman said.

The company moved into its current 200,000-squaree-foot Harvard Avenue factory — formerly a warehouse for the Higbee department store — in the 1980s, and Goodman took over the business from his father, Henry, in 1996. He immediately ushered in "a growth spurt," the CEO said, by purchasing "a couple" of regional operators and consolidating production at the Newburgh site.

The more recent business boom can be attributed in part to a 2017 rebrand that refocused the company on quality, according to Goodman.

"As opposed to trying to be everything to everybody and all different types of mattress products and all different types of price points, we've sort of focused in on that upper- to middle-price-range, premium-quality product," he explained.

Goodman said White Dove uses top-of-the line materials in its collections, which include the Duality, Cambridge and Atlas mattress brands, even springing for expensive high-density foams that "just don't fit the economics" of lower-cost, national labels.

Those premium foams nearly eliminate the most pervasive issue in mattress durability — body impressions created by users sleeping in the same spot night after night.

"We have a 15-year warranty, and it kicks in with a 0.5-inch body impression," he said. "The industry standard is 10 years, and no warranty by the major brands kicks in until a 1.5-inch impression. So, we warranty it for 50% longer with one-third of the body-impression size required to trigger the warranty, because we are that confident with the product."

The company is also one of the few manufacturers still hand tufting, which it does with 70%-75% of its products, Goodman said, as it helps preserve mattress stability over time.

White Dove distributes its brands primarily through furniture and mattress-only stores located within a 300-mile radius of Cleveland. But mattresses produced at the Newburgh Heights plant are sold all over the country, Goodman said, via partnerships with "a few" online retailers.

"We have one of these big, fancy machines that smashes the mattresses and rolls them up to fit into a rectangular box," he said. "Then we have an extra truck in the dock every day that we load up with these shipments."

While he declined to identify which or how many different online sites contract with White Dove, Goodman stressed that the segment is a critical factor in its growth.

"Around 35% of the mattress business in the U.S. is estimated to be online," he said. "It's the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. mattress industry right now, so, yes, having some exposure to that is important."

The private company currently employs about 80 people. Along with pay-rate increases, White Dove moved to a 10-hour, four-day workweek this summer in its bid to attract and retain talent.

"Most of our people love that they get a three-day weekend every week," Goodman said, "and we believe we've gotten some new hires because of it."

Goodman added that recent raw material stability, robust online mattress sales and an acceleration in White Dove's own brands support continued growth.

In a strange twist of fate, one of the company's burgeoning lines, Duality, is a two-sided mattress that the company introduced at the behest of older consumers "who think a two-sided mattress is what a mattress should be," he said.

"It's a pretty cool to be growing at 100," Goodman said. "I am very glad to be here, but I don't plan to be here at 200."

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