He’s not afraid to dress in a mattress costume: He’s Andrew Schlesser, aka “Mattman,” manager at Sweet Dreams Mattress in Charlotte, North Carolina. Schlesser, ahem, Mattman shares what he learned at the ISPA Sustainability Conference and how he plans to use it, along with his superpowers, at his retail chain.
Transcript
Dave Perry
Hey, it’s Dave Perry. It is a wrap on the ISPA Sustainability Conference, and we have a superhero with us to help us celebrate. MattMan of Sweet Dreams. So what did you think, Mattman?
Andrew Schlesser
Dude. You guys have some awesome guests, and it was a packed room in there.
Waynette Goodson
Well, didn’t we? We expected, like, 50 folks, and like 185 people ended up signing up because it’s such a relevant on-trend term that you really have to know about these days in order to do business. So tell us about some of your key takeaways.
Andrew Schlesser
Oh, man, you guys had a lot of great speakers. Dr. Dent was great because, basically, he walked us through, at the very end, he walked us through all these things that make your business and make your product circular. And he asked the audience; where are you at on this? And we got to hear a lot of great ideas and great action points that people can take away to make tiny changes today for big impacts tomorrow.
Dave Perry
That was one of my key takeaways. Just take small steps, and small steps will lead to big steps. Yeah. And I also like the term day one. So today’s day one on the new journey.
Andrew Schlesser
I love day one.
Dave Perry
Why are you here?
Andrew Schlesser
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m here because I’m a superhero, and we don’t like pollution, and it’s in the superhero contract. So I wanted to learn about the buzzword here was circular of having products that can be reused and also sustainability. So I think one of our key action points is to do what was suggested of sitting down and looking at some of the guidelines with our team, not only our team, but our customers, to find out where we can have the biggest impact or where we might have spots that are easier for us to make a change.
But I really enjoyed how you can involve both your team and your customer base. That was really interesting and fun to engage the folks that shop with us.
Dave Perry
All right. Well, we’re going to go out on an exciting note. One, two, three. Superhero. Superhero. Woo!
