Sleep Savvy’s Retail Road Trip shines the spotlight on successful bedding retailers. Are you one?

My mom and dad were teachers—both in the traditional sense of serving in the classroom and as the parents of five rowdy, curious and roaming children. A cornerstone of their successful pedagogical practices at school and home was recognizing that everyone learns differently. For instance, my sister is a ferocious reader and copious notetaker, while my brothers learn best by trial and error. The key, in my parents’ minds, was recognizing that regardless of our learning styles, we all need a mentor to help guide us through the process.

A second lesson I learned from them was that we never age out of learning. Investigating a new way of doing something, approaching a problem differently or improving on an already successful idea not only keeps our minds agile but also makes our personal lives easier and careers more profitable.

This rings true especially at retail. As Julie Palm, former editor in chief of Sleep Savvy, noted several years ago, “Most of us don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. Whether it’s a handy tip or a business-altering concept, it’s nice to see how an idea has worked for someone else. Then we can borrow it, tweak it and make it our own.”

That’s the idea behind our flagship feature, Retail Road Trip. Here, we profile a successful mattress retailer. Sometimes it’s a single-location sleep specialist—such as this month’s cover story on Sleepland, an 11,000-square-foot, spalike showroom inside a 1.3 million-square-foot furniture store—while other times we spotlight a department store or bedding chain. Even though these stores vary in size and location, they all share good ideas and best practices—everything from boosting sales and creating innovative marketing strategies to inspiring retail sales associates, perfecting delivery services and more.

Mary Best
Editor in chief

So why would fiercely competitive retailers want to tell the secrets of their success? “In part, it’s because it is an honor to be featured in a magazine read by tens of thousands of their peers,” Palm observed. “But I think they’re also willing to share because improving the practices and reputations of other mattress retailers helps the entire industry. Retailers with unkempt stores, shoddy selling practices and low-low price marketing tarnish us all.”

Would you like to see your store showcased on the pages of Sleep Savvy? Do you think your business has a unique story with ideas to share with the industry? If so, please let me know at mbest@sleepproducts.org. We’d love to tell your story, celebrate your success and help other retailers learn by your example. O