Meaty beginning of success
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, September 22, 2003
Long Island City, N.Y. — It all started with the prospect of a juicy steak.
Napoleon Barragan, a native of Ecuador, owned a small furniture store in New York City's Queens borough. One day in 1976, he saw a newspaper advertisement for a new business called Dial-A-Steak. Consumers could order a steak by telephone and have it delivered to their homes.
Barragan realized the same concept could be applied to mattresses, with equally tasty results.
On Sept. 22, 1976, he founded Dial-A-Mattress and began running classified ads offering customers home delivery of mattresses for $29.99.
Today, Dial-A-Mattress is known as 1-800-Mattress and it ranks among the Top 100 furniture stores, according to Furniture/Today.
The company has steadily developed its expertise in the telephone sales arena.
It started promoting its 1-800-Mattress number broadly in October 1988, boosting sales dramatically. At that time the company also expanded its infrastructure. It established a customer service division to deal with its customers' needs, and also installed its first computer system to keep track of inventory, sales, deliveries and all the details in what had become an extremely complex business.
Sales in 1988 reached $4 million.
In 1994, 1-800-Mattress went nationwide, with dealers selling the company's products from coast to coast. Also that year, the company launched 1-800-4 Furniture, a national shopping network for furniture.
By 1995 the company hit the $55 million sales mark, and even sold more than $350,000 worth of mattresses in a single day.
Nowadays, 1-800-Mattress is "one of the nation's most successful direct marketing companies," its literature proclaims. It sells its products across 60% of the country, and its dealers are well entrenched on the East Coast but extend all the way to the West Coast.
Barragan, founder and owner, said the company's success stems from a variety of factors, especially the choices it offers.
"We give the customer choices in how to buy: on the Internet, by telephone or in a store," he said. "We also give our customers choices on when they want to get their bedding: today, tomorrow or another day. If they pick today, they have choices between morning, afternoon and evening. Most customers choose evenings.
"We also give them three more choices," he continued. "They can have six-hour, four-hour or two-hour delivery windows. Customers who are skeptical about our business are very pleased after they get the product. Thirty percent of our customers say the product is better than they expected, while 70% say it is what they expected. Those experiences are shared. Word of mouth advertising is a key to our success. That's why we have survived so many difficult times."
