Richmond can sleep a little easier tonight.
Sleepy’s, a New-York based mattress store with 700 stores, will be opening about 10 locations in the area. They’ve not signed leases just yet but are close on at least one location with plans for about nine others.
This will be their farthest push south. The nearest of the 700 locations are in Fredericksburg and Northern Virginia.
“We planned to go there a year ago, but it seemed like the prudent thing was to wait, as we did,” said David Acker, the president of the company.
“And now the economy has settled down and become more understandable, and it’s a time to consider our growth.”
Acker said he’s not sure which locations the company will lease. The company sells only mattresses. The products, which include mattresses from popular manufactures like Serta, Sealy’s, Simmons and Tempur-Pedic, range in price from $299 to $8,000.
Connie Nielsen, a commercial broker with Thalhimer who specializes in retail, said that it’ll likely be a few stores on Broad Street, a few on Hull Street and on Midlothian Turnpike in Chesterfield.
“They’re mostly going in spots with good visibility with 4,000 to 8,000 square feet,” Nielsen said.
This has not been a good year for furniture stores. Sales in the bedding industry are down 12 percent so far this year. And in a sign of the times, Mattress Discounters filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in November 2008 before being sold to Richmond-based Roomstore. (You can read more about that here.) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/25/AR2008112502210.html But the business may be springing back. Sales in October were up 6.2 percent compared to the same month last year. That’s the first sales gain this year.
Acker said that the company sells good sleep, not just furniture, and that helps keep demand up even when fewer people are buying homes and splurging on new furnishings.
“I think that more than ever, sleep is an important thing for everyone, for both mental and physical health,” he said.
“We spent a lot of 2009 losing sleep.”
Aaron Kremer is the BizSense editor. Please send story tips to Editor@richmondbizsense.com.
Good luck Richmond, here comes deceptive advertising, pushy high-pressure sales and lots of consumer complaints about over-priced mattresses.
http://www.complaintsboard.com/?search=sleepys&everything=Everything
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/sleepys_nj.html
http://ctwatchdog.com/2009/08/14/sleepys-the-bedbug-column-the-courant-refused-to-publish-about-its-prime-advertiser
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/pr2007/pr_051407.shtml
These are only the top couple in a search result that said:
Results 1 – 10 of about 5,690,000 for sleepy’s complaints
Bought a sleepys mattress in 1996 living in NYC metro. Service and price were good at the time. Best thing – still using the mattress here in RIC after coming here years ago. It does fine.