Business Spotlight: Heads in Beds

Keith and Ursula James hired their first employee two years after starting their own retail mattress store. It was a long two years.

“We did it all,” says Ursula James, then a new mother through adoption. “We raised our babies in here, just to get it started.”

But that was the small-business-owner life they chose to reduce hectic travel schedules in medical sales. Two decades ago, Keith worked for Bausch & Lomb selling contact lenses and solution across three states, and Ursula was a pharmaceutical sales representative.

“I was traveling all the time. We started the business so we could be home,” Ursula says.

The retail industry was within reach for Keith through his father, Joe, who owned and operated a Simmons mattress store in Columbia. All the while, Keith had his eye on the business.

“I was watching the Columbia store and decided I was going to open one in Springfield,” he says. “It’s always a dream for everybody to have your own business.”

His dad coached him in Springfield during the summer of 1997. “He was here in June and July, and he was gone. From then on, we took it over,” he recalls.

The husband-and-wife business partners have ironed out the early small-business kinks and operate four Simmons Beautyrest Sleep Gallery stores selling the Simmons and Tempur-Pedic mattress lines. Two stores are in Springfield, and one each is in Hollister and Columbia.

In January, the Jameses returned to the Springfield retail center where it all began 17 years ago.

“We’re back at home, here,” Ursula says of the 650 E. Battlefield St. showroom next door to Wood You Furniture.

The company originally vacated the Battlefield space in January 2012 to join the south-side Furniture Row on East Independence Street and in the meantime learned a 3-year-old East Sunshine Street store was not in the working formula. The Jameses moved the 3645 E. Sunshine St. store this year.

“I should have stayed here and opened Independence,” Keith says of the store shuffling.

Keith says the Independence store added two years ago is the top-grossing in the bunch, but he declined to disclose sales figures.

The Jameses added the Tempur-Pedic brand five years ago. “About five years too late, really,” Keith says. “When it came out, it was selling like crazy.”

Beautyrest Sleep Gallery operates in a $14 billion retail bedding industry that is projected to expand to $16 billion in 2018, according to Furniture Today.

A few years ago, any retail growth was hard to come by. The Jameses say 2008–10 were the company’s leanest years.

“That was scary, being a business owner and knowing I had the responsibility of not only just our business but also our guys,” Ursula says of the staff of 11. “I feel the weight of that pressure. Thankfully, we survived all of that.”

In IBISWorld’s January market report on mattress manufacturing, the research company says recovery is on the way for the industry’s lackluster sales performance of late. IBISWorld projects 1.5 percent annual growth for some 400 mattress manufacturers in the $8 billion industry.

Locally, the Jameses are dealing with increasing competition – from just a handful of mattress sellers when they opened to more than a dozen in the Springfield market today.

“We got to figure out why they’d buy from us versus the other 17 stores,” he says, rattling off Ashley Furniture, Furniture Factory Outlet, Slumberland, Bedding Mart, Joplimo and Mattress Firm.

A longtime advocate of the Roy Williams school of advertising, Keith says the owners target top-of-mind awareness above all else. Their chosen medium is radio advertising, as suggested by Williams, aka “the wizard of ads.” The Jameses write their own copy, but never the “Crazy Larry’s blowout mattress sale” gimmicks.

“There’s not a mattress you’ll buy anytime, anywhere, that’s not on sale. Everybody will say it’s on sale,” Keith says, adding Beautyrest Sleep Gallery chooses to build name recognition, embodied by Ursula. “They think of Ursula, she’s kind of our brand.”

Beautyrest Sleep Gallery mattresses range from $400 to $3,000, and manager Tony Schreiner says the best seller is the Beautyrest Recharge, which recently rated high in Consumer Reports. It retails for $600 to $1,100, he says.

Ursula says Mercy Springfield Communities has ordered 25 twin mattresses for the health system’s hospitality house, and Camp Barnabas is expected to purchase about a dozen mattresses this summer.

Last year, the children’s camp in Purdy bought 42 mattresses, says Mindy Frech, director of community relations for Camp Barnabas.

“We redid our guest housing quarters last summer, and they partnered with us,” Frech says of the $11,000 deal to update roughly 20-year old mattresses.

Ursula says the industry recommends replacing mattresses every 10 years, but the span is typically eight to 15.

For such purchases, Frech says Camp Barnabas collects multiple quotes and often buys from the Springfield market. With some 1,500 kids coming through each summer, the camp recently purchased office furniture from Hank’s Fine Furniture, a couple cars from Reliable Chevrolet and a vehicle wrap by Wrap-Aholic, as well as $8,000 in batteries from Battery Plus to keep camp operations humming.

“When you trust someone you’re working with, and you know they’re helping you out, you go back and do business with them again,” Frech says.[[In-content Ad]]