Thanks to quality merchandise and excellent customer service, Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike is celebrating its 30th year in business.
Say the name “Mattress Mike” in Santa Barbara, California, and chances are someone has either shopped in his store, known someone who has or seen the name in an advertisement. Michael Gustason is the owner of Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike, located inside La Cumbre Plaza, an open-air, Mission Revival-style shopping center, framed by the Santa Ynez mountains and towering palm trees. While most furniture stores don’t feature such majestic views from the parking lot, Gustason has applicable lessons for any retailer as he looks back on 30 years in business.
A Family Affair: The Gustason Legacy
Gustason got into the bedding business in 1994, thanks to a friend who showed him the ins and outs of the industry. “I just took it and ran with it and made it my own,” he says, reflecting on the past while standing among an assortment of mattresses.
FACELIFT A former Sears department store was transformed into Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike.FACELIFT A former Sears department store was transformed into Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike.
For the past two years, the store has operated inside La Cumbre Plaza, breathing new life into a former Sears. When customers walk in, they’re greeted warmly by J.R. Shambaugh, a longtime friend of Gustason. In the entryway, shoppers will see seating from brands like La-Z-Boy and Stressless and massage chairs from Cozzia. Toward the back of the 55,000-square-foot space is where shoppers will find what Mattress Mike built his name and reputation on before expanding into other furnishings categories.
Now, his son Garret Gustason is becoming part of his legacy. As the chief operating officer for the store, Garret Gustason worked his way up from delivery assistant to sales associate to managerial roles. “I like to think of us as two sides of the same coin,” he says of his father. “My dad, of course, has been amazing, letting me take the reins of a lot of things, especially front-of-house stuff. We both have our own roles in the business. But we can say, ‘I’m thinking of it from this direction. You’re thinking of it from that direction.’ And we are just like yin and yang.”
Curating the Perfect Sleep Experience
That yin and yang aspect is most evident in the store’s approach to merchandising, which ranges (in queen sizes) from a $215 model from Nashville-based Southerland Sleep to a $13,000 mattress from high-end brand Aireloom, manufactured in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and owned by Kluft & Co.
Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike also stocks Cloudtech, Diamond, Englander, Malouf, Sealy, Stearns & Foster, Technogel and Tempur-Pedic. In the coming weeks, the store will add products from Avocado to its lineup.
“Getting on our floor is very difficult,” Garret Gustason says. Michael Gustason adds: “I put my hands on every piece and select everything.” If Michael finds anything that he likes on his own, it’s game on, but his son will also recommend products for him to test so he can give his stamp of approval. “It’s ‘I love this,’ or ‘Nope, that’s not coming on our floor,’” Garret Gustason says.
Michael Gustason compares his merchandising mix to a marriage, which ideally consists of an equal partnership. As long as the relationship is symbiotic, things stay the same. “If a company gets bought out and something changes in their infrastructure we might go away from them,” he says. “But we have a lot of loyalty to the vendors themselves.”
Garret Gustason also acts as a buffer between the vendors and his father. “When it comes to new mattresses, I put up a little bit of a wall,” he says. “If I don’t personally want to do business with you, I’m not going to let you get ahold of my father.”
Service That Goes the Extra Mile
The same care that the Gustasons take in selecting merchandise is also how they approach customer service. They have their own in-house team of tech services for moving furniture, enabling more control and oversight.
“I have a way about me where if you don’t have a bed to sleep on that night and I have to deliver it at midnight, I will,” Michael Gustason says. The father-son duo notes that while that is an extreme example, it illustrates that anyone on the 16-person team will pitch in to take care of the customer. Often, the retailer delivers purchases on the same day or within a day.
According to Michael Gustason, the team maps the customers and their bedding needs with such a high degree of efficiency, that they’re almost able to eliminate the need for comfort returns.
“So, say you came in and said, ‘I want the cheapest bed,’ and you’re going to sleep on it,” he says. “I wouldn’t sell it to you.” When he can tell something won’t be a great fit, he steers the shopper in a new direction.
Building a Reputation Through Customer Satisfaction
It’s this level of expertise that has led to Michael Gustason’s 30 years of success in the business. And now, the store is reaching new generations. “If you Google us or look at our reviews, you’ll see what people are saying about us,” Michael Gustason says. “We’re dealing with generations now, you know. The grandparents say to the grandchild, ‘You can’t go anywhere but Mattress Mike,’ and that means a lot to me.”
Word of mouth is an integral part of their business and an invaluable channel that money can’t buy. For everything else, they turn to traditional advertising. Starting in the parking lot, large signs and sandwich boards direct potential customers toward the store. The company also shows up on pretty much every other channel — television commercials, magazine print ads, online ads, social media, newspapers and, perhaps most surprisingly, the Yellow Pages. Although the Yellow Pages might not enjoy the same ubiquitousness it had in the past, it still exists, albeit digitally. For Michael Gustason, the Yellow Pages is still an important tool for generating business. According to him, it caters to an older demographic in Santa Barbara, and his investment in the service pays off generously. He concedes that in places like Los Angeles, Yellow Pages might not be as successful, but in smaller cities, it’s a useful marketing tool retailers could be overlooking.
No matter how the Gustasons reach their consumers, whether by word of mouth, print advertisements or social media, one golden rule always applies. “Without the consumer, you don’t have a business,” Michael Gustason says. “Love the consumer and the consumer loves you back.”
A Sustainable Approach: Mattress Recycling at Mattress Mike
Although most of Furniture Gallery by Mattress Mike’s space spotlights new products, the retailer makes space for the old, too.
As part of the Mattress Recycling Council’s network of 230 mattress drop-off centers in California, the store also operates as a place to discard used mattresses. Since the program’s inception in 2016, 11 million mattresses and 431 million pounds of material have been recycled. The retailer first got involved with the MRC doing retailer takebacks in the Commercial Volume Program and has recently switched over to being a collection site.
According to Michael Gustason, it is easy for him to accommodate the program because he has such a large facility. While mattress collection at Mattress Mike ends up saving tons of material, it also relieves pressure on local trash company MarBorg Industries by diverting waste.
Although Gustason and MRC enjoy a fruitful relationship now, that wasn’t always the case. “At first, I had a hard time with MRC,” he admits. Until MRC was created in California, he used Los Angeles-based company Gateway Mattress to recycle mattresses and didn’t understand why, with the MRC, customers would have to pay a fee. Worried that the collected fees would be mishandled, he reached out to everyone on the team to express his hesitation about the program. The MRC team explained how MRC operates and the difference it would make in the community.
“Everything has been very pleasant ever since,” he says. “I’m so proud of them. They’ve done what they set out to do.”
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