Mattress First just released its case study of how one family-owned midwest furniture store doubled their percentage of sales in mattresses.
Kloss Furniture hired Martin Roberts Design to help them remodel their existing store environment, including their mattress area. The case study highlights how the new design helped boost their mattress sales to double.
Kloss Furniture has a long history of being in the O’Fallon area of St. Louis since 1976, and there are many competitors in both the furniture and mattress space.
The old rule of thumb in full line furniture stores was that a store would be lucky if mattress sales made up 10% of overall sales. For Kloss Furniture, mattress sales made up 8% of overall sales. The mattress lineup consisted of Mattress 1st (the private label mattress line from Furniture First National Buying Group) and Serta, a manufacturer the store carried since opening its doors in 1976.
Kloss Furniture was one of the first retailers to implement the Mattress First retail store concept in the summer of 2013. Several key elements for the retail store were defined in collaboration between Furniture First, the buying group with ownership of the Mattress First private label, Martin Roberts Design and Knorr Marketing.
The Entrance
One of the key components of the store concept is to let the customer know that a full line furniture store sells mattresses by setting up a separate exterior entrance directly into the mattress department.
The Space
The previous store format separated the two brands in the location with walls and columns. To fit the Mattress First model, the walls were removed to create sight lines from the full line furniture gallery.
Per the layout designed by Martin Roberts, the mattress gallery stands out with a red ring suspended from the ceiling proclaiming “mattresses.”
The beds are arranged against mid-height walls. This arrangement has the psychological benefit of inviting the customer in to explore the department. Lighting is kept indirect with tall textured floor lamps between the beds so as not to blind the customer when lying down to try out the mattresses. The finished mattress space now occupies less than 9% of the 40,000 square foot sales floor.
The Results
Kloss Furniture found the reinvention of their mattress department as a Kloss Mattress First department well worth their investment.
Sales in their mattress department grew by 28% when they when the opened the Kloss Mattress First. Before, their mattress sales had made up about 8% of their overall business. Now, mattress sales make up 18% of the overall business, a significant amount for less than 9% of the sales floor.
Read the full case study here: