Furniture Today calls for product photos, information for Vegas market

Signage both inside and outside the store emphasizes the retailer’s pride in its Northwest location.

CLACKAMAS, Ore. — Create a plan, execute the plan, and then, plan some more. That’s the mantra of the president and owner of Mattress World Northwest, who credits the 21-store chain’s success with a strong business plan that keeps the entire team focused on the mission.

Shari and Sean and Hathaway have built their mattress retail business from a single store to a chain of 21 locations.

“We have been successful because we have a plan that the entire team follows,” said Sean Hathaway, president of Mattress World Northwest, based in Clackamas, Ore. “We set our plan, and then we execute really well.”

The plan is built on the retailer’s core concepts that include valuing every employee and investing so that each person succeeds. That same focus on its internal people shines outward into the communities the company serves through its ongoing partnerships to support five local charities on a year-round basis.

Hathaway attributes the company’s overall success to three core concepts to which every employee adheres. Those concepts are:

Consumers are at the top of the list.

“When you strive to help your customer it shows,” Hathaway said. “Everything flows from that. Not only do we greet each customer with a smile, listen to their needs and concerns, and give them the best overall experience; we strive to deliver the best selection of high quality mattresses in our market which includes the name brands, plus all the unique brands that customers don’t readily find at your typical mattress store.”

The Mattress World Northwest stores are filled with a variety of brands, including Aireloom, Beautyrest, BedTech, Posh & Lavish, Serta, ReST, Sealy, Southerland that manufactures the Hathaway collection, Stearns & Foster and Temper-Pedic.

The retailer’s team’s No. 1 focus is on selling better sleep, and it is engrained in the company’s training mantra. It’s a constant, repetitive part of the conversation, Hathaway said.

“With every email or announcement we send, we reaffirm that,” he said, adding that the retailer maps out operationally how to make that focus happen. “If you don’t put the customer first by zeroing in on delivering a better night’s sleep, you’re only out for yourself, and you lose out on engaging with the consumer in a helpful manner.”

To live up to that focus, Mattress World Northwest’s merchandising strategy is deliberately broad. Hathaway said the retailer loves to partner with the big name brands — consumers are most familiar with those names — but it is also keen on rounding out the mix with a curated selection of higher-end niche products.

The lower end of the market is also covered where Hathaway says the company is trying to present consumers with the most comfortable mattress at a sharp price point.

A local mattress manufacturer gives the retailer the ability to be nimble, and in the last two years, nimble was a very necessary trait.

And Mattress World Northwest is a loyal partner. “We don’t pick up a company and then dump it for a lower price,” Hathaway said. “We like longevity; we have been with partners for decades.”

Another core concept for the retailer is community. Mattress World Northwest is incredibly active in local charities with five groups that it works with on a year-round basis, including the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which is a personal passion for the Hathaway family; Make a Wish Foundation; and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The retailer raises money for the groups in its stores, supports the groups by attending and sponsoring booths at events, and provides television commercials that help promote the various activities.

“We genuinely enjoy and love helping the community. On top of our mainstay charities, we will help whenever and however we can,” Hathaway said. “This year, with the help of our manufacturing partners, especially Sealy, we were able to donate 500 mattresses to an organization that was helping families that lost their homes to the forest fires in Oregon.”

In conjunction with local high schools, the retailer has been active in helping clubs and sports teams raise money through fundraising sales. Mattress World Northwest has an outside sales department that works closely with the schools, and to date the team has helped raise more than $240,000 the schools.

Hathaway said the company works diligently to ensure its 70 employees succeed by providing the products that resonate with consumers and upgrading its message to the community to keep driving traffic through the doors.

Mattress World Northwest offers a solid pay package, a matching retirement program, health insurance, and a human resources and management teams that are vested in helping employees in all stages of life have a better work and family life, he said.

“As a true family-owned small business, we have employees that have been with us for over a decade or more,” Hathaway said, adding that the general manager started as a delivery driver when he was 18, and the warehouse manager started in the same role at 17.

“We have sales and admin staff that came to us out of high school who have homes and bustling families. And, of course, we attract great new talent from around the area that want to join our team.”

Mattress World Northwest got its start in 1996 when Sean Hathaway opened a 5,000-square-foot custom sofa store offering consumers a nearly endless selection of fabrics and multiple frame choices. Later, he partnered with a mattress retailer to open a 10,000-square-foot store that offered furniture on one side and mattress on the other.

Hathaway went out on his own again in 2005 and opened a single mattress store in Portland, Ore., and named it Mattress World Northwest.

In 2012, an 11-store mattress retailer went out of business. Instead of buying the stores, Hathaway stepped in and arranged to lease spaces where eight of the locations were winding down and hired any employees that were still there.

Two years after taking over the eight mattress stores and re-branding them Mattress World Northwest, the stores embarked on visual makeover, created a top-tier website, developed a long-term strategic plan, hired a business consultant and built a well-trained management team that understood and worked from one set of values.

“Once we had the management, admin and warehouse team striving for the same goal, our customers’ satisfaction, and working under the same framework on our strategic plan it was easy to let the managers manage without constant supervision,” Hathaway said. “The admin team became an asset that continually helps and guides the decisions of the management team.

“I believe we have an incredibly motivated and talented crew, so it’s great to set the parameters and let them build out the sections of the business they are best at while coordinating how it works with the other manager’s departments.”

Mattress World Northwest’s game plan helped buoy the retailer through the worst parts of the COVID pandemic. Like others in the bedding industry, the retailer has had a doozy of a couple of years, but Hathaway said his team weathered through the toughest of times.

The stores were closed for two months, and during that time, the company gave the employees their health insurance. That was first and foremost at the top of the list.

Then, the team started selling over the phone as a way to keep sales in the pipeline, and the company flipped the switch on its website’s shopping cart.

Hathaway admits those were scary months with sales down between 70% and 80%. The bulk of the retailer’s customers are brick-and-mortar shoppers.

“It cut our sales dramatically, but we made enough to patch together the business,” he said. “For the prior 10 years, we had been saving. From Day One, we had a goal to have an emergency fund, and we had an aggressive strategy of saving. That put us in a saving mentality, and we had the war chest to weather the storm.”

When the stores reopened the week before Memorial Day 2020, Hathaway said “it was crazy.” Hathaway took his war chest and packed his warehouse with product. It was a scary move that paid off.

The growth plan for the retailer is to open two stores a year and to continue growing its outside sales program. The store footprint ranges from 3,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet.

Not too shabby for a company that started as a one-shop operation.

“By putting the customer, community and employees first, Mattress World Northwest has been able to grow to the 21 stores it is today,” Hathaway said. “None of this could have been done without the dedication and hard work from every family member, our manufacturing and landlord partners and of course, the trust and support we get from the community. We are blessed to work with so many great people.”

I’m Sheila Long O’Mara, executive editor at Furniture Today. Throughout my 25-year career in the home furnishings industry, I have been an editor with a number of industry publications and spent a brief stint with a public relations agency where I worked with some of the industry’s leading bedding brands. I rejoined Furniture Today in December 2020 with a focus on bedding and sleep products. It’s a homecoming for me, as I was a writer and editor with Furniture Today from 1994 until 2002. I’m happy to be back and look forward to telling the important stories impacting bedding retailers and manufacturers.

Sign up to get exclusive industry information delivered directly to your inbox.

© 2022 BridgeTower Media. All rights reserved.

Use of this website is subject to its Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell My Info/Cookie Policy

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.