Join Kathryn Greene as she interviews Nate Cangemi, a seasoned industry expert, about his new venture: Golden Dreams Mattress. Discover how Nate’s innovative approach redefines the mattress shopping experience, focusing on personalized service, high-quality products, and a relaxing atmosphere.
Transcript
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:07:13
Kathryn Greene
Hi. I’m Kathryn Greene, senior editor of Sleep Savvy magazine, and I’m here today with Nate Cangemi. Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:00:07:15 – 00:00:12:09
Nate Cangemi
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be talking with Sleep Savvy.
00:00:12:15 – 00:00:20:06
Kathryn Greene
Yeah. And I know you have some exciting news and something big in the works. You’re opening your own store, right?
00:00:20:08 – 00:00:54:04
Nate Cangemi
Yeah. After 20-plus years in the mattress sleep industry. I’ve decided that I want to go more direct to consumers and try to help people get better sleep and and try to educate and equip people to make good decisions. The right decision, I should say, when it comes to their mattress, is, I mean, such a, I can’t even, like, begin to overstate how important a decision your mattress is.
00:00:54:04 – 00:00:54:13
Kathryn Greene
Yeah.
00:00:54:16 – 00:01:01:09
Nate Cangemi
So, Yeah. We just decided that we wanted to try something and offer people something different.
00:01:01:11 – 00:01:11:06
Kathryn Greene
Okay. Amazing. And before we get into your store, you know, you mentioned you have 20-plus years of experience in the bedding industry. How did you get into bedding? How did you find your way into the industry?
00:01:11:08 – 00:01:39:23
Nate Cangemi
Wow. That is actually one of my favorite stories to tell. And I’ll try to tell it as quickly as I can. But I was, this is early 2000s, 21 – 22 years ago. I was working for a vinyl-coated fabric company, which is like using bar stools and restaurants and chairs, and I went to a golf outing for a customer.
00:01:40:00 – 00:02:08:23
Nate Cangemi
And I got paired with the vice president of sales from Carpenter, Michael Faus, who is one of the greatest human beings in our industry and didn’t know anything about polyurethane foam, didn’t know anything about mattresses, just like him. Just hit it off with him. You spend 4 or 5 hours on a golf cart with the person, and you, especially a person like that, and you just you create a bond.
00:02:09:00 – 00:02:35:14
Nate Cangemi
And, so over the next couple years, we stayed in touch, and then, maybe two years, I think it was about two years after that round of golf. He actually hired me to become a sales rep and work for Carpenter. So I worked for Carpenter for about 12 years and then made a switch to FXI, so I worked for basically the two largest polyurethane foam manufacturers in the country.
00:02:35:16 – 00:03:05:15
Nate Cangemi
For about 14, 15 years. For the last seven years, I’ve worked as a sales consultant, helping different companies, mostly international companies, bring their products and their components into the U.S. for use in mattresses. So, I’ve sold pretty much everything that goes into a mattress. There are not many components I haven’t worked with.
00:03:05:17 – 00:03:08:12
Nate Cangemi
But yeah. So that’s kind of my history.
00:03:08:14 – 00:03:20:01
Kathryn Greene
Okay. Amazing. So, you know your store coming in soon. Golden Dreams Mattress. Why was now the right time? Have you always wanted to open your own store? Just kind of walk me through how we got here.
00:03:20:03 – 00:03:45:19
Nate Cangemi
I’d say I’ve had the idea for a good while. Five or six years. And it’s primarily just been because I would help my friends, who knew I was in the mattress industry. As I would help them buy a mattress. You know, I maybe take them to a store, or I’d connect them with one of my customers so that they could get a, you know, a nice price on a mattress.
00:03:45:21 – 00:04:19:04
Nate Cangemi
I realized that people weren’t buying mattresses the right way and that they weren’t looking for the right things. And so I had always thought like, man, if I had like a little showroom where I could show some mattresses, I could be a lot more helpful. But then, I think particularly as we came out of Covid, I started to realize that the bedding industry was going in two different and that online sales were becoming such a big part of mattress sales.
00:04:19:04 – 00:04:42:21
Nate Cangemi
I mean, it’s like up over 40% now of mattresses are bought online. And that was, in my opinion, the wrong way to buy a mattress. That’s just how I personally feel. I don’t think that people should buy mattresses blindly online. I don’t think that reviews of mattresses really have any relevance to individuals because we’re all so different.
00:04:42:23 – 00:05:17:19
Nate Cangemi
What we need out of a mattress and how a mattress is going to serve us is so personalized that another person giving a good review online doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a good mattress for me. And then the other thing I started realizing is that, at retail, and with all the trends that are going on at retail, mattress retail, brick and mortar retail was really lacking in, the experience that you would want to give to a customer who was making this important decision.
00:05:17:19 – 00:05:51:00
Nate Cangemi
So, if you want to be different from online, you can’t simply just have a room with a bunch of rectangles on the floor. You need to really offer customers an opportunity to be educated and empowered. And then going beyond that., you know, in all my experience with going to, like, the Las Vegas market, when we’re in Las Vegas, you see how much effort goes into creating the environment that that the mattress manufacturers present their products in.
00:05:51:01 – 00:06:22:16
Nate Cangemi
You know, there’s beautiful lighting. It’s well-decorated. They create a vibe. They create an atmosphere. And then when you’re in those rooms, then you compare that with when you go to, you know, a national retail chain. And it’s nothing like that. So that’s really what made me think, like, if we could create an environment that’s more like the Vegas market, more like going shopping, for like when a bride goes shopping for, her wedding dress.
00:06:22:22 – 00:07:01:12
Nate Cangemi
If we could create that experience. Because this is becoming more and more of an experience economy, we could be successful in helping people, you know, make decisions about what they sleep on. And so I got connected with a bunch of people in the industry through Sleep Summit, which is a community of people that come together every year and just network and just realized that you know, the people were all here in the industry that could help me, you know, achieve this and do it in a way that was that was going to be successful.
00:07:01:18 – 00:07:17:18
Nate Cangemi
And so that’s kind of what we’ve been working on for the last year. We’ve just sat back and kind of studied retail studied what’s working, and then tried to create this process. The sales process to go along with this environment that we were creating for people.
00:07:17:20 – 00:07:28:19
Kathryn Greene
Sure. It’s so exciting. I can’t wait to see photos when it opens up. How did you land on your product mix? You know, there are so many products out there. How did you kind of start to narrow that down?
00:07:28:21 – 00:07:58:21
Nate Cangemi
So it was relatively easy for me because, being in the mattress industry and working with these manufacturers over the last 20 years, one of the things that I came to realize was that you had some incredible manufacturers that weren’t necessarily household brands. They weren’t like big national brands, but they make outstanding products. And they’re using, for the most part, the best quality components that are available.
00:07:58:21 – 00:08:33:19
Nate Cangemi
And I know that because that’s what I was selling. And so for me, I looked around and thought, right here in California, actually, right here in Southern California, are several brands that are top of the line, best-in-class mattresses that we could offer. Some of them are available online. But for the most part, when people go into, like a Mattress Firm or even large regional, mattress stores, they’re not going to find these brands.
00:08:33:19 – 00:09:02:23
Nate Cangemi
And so, we’re sort of creating that vibe, like, we don’t want to compete with Mattress Firm. That’s not who I’m looking to compete with. I’m just looking for a very specific type of customer that wants to come in and learn about, you know, good sleep and how to get it, and how the mattress and the pillow and the base and the sleep essentials all relate to enhancing their sleep experience.
00:09:06:15 – 00:09:31:00
Nate Cangemi
We wanted to be able to curate a line based on not having any redundancy on the floor and trying to keep it simple. But for each category that we have, having a story to tell and having something to offer to people, and so working with these local, Southern California brands, we were able to do that.
00:09:31:00 – 00:09:34:22
Nate Cangemi
So we’re really, really happy about the line that we’ve created.
00:09:34:24 – 00:09:50:08
Kathryn Greene
Oh, that’s amazing. And then, you know, you’re you’re creating the showroom experience for your customers. Come in and enjoy. I would love to hear a little bit about the retail sales associate side. How will they present this experience to the customers once they walk in? How will they be engaging with them?
00:09:50:10 – 00:10:10:23
Nate Cangemi
Yeah. So it’s going to start with me. I’m going to be the retail sales associate to start, you know, for the foreseeable future. I would love to and look forward to, you know, hiring people, you know, helping because I do want to grow. I’d like to have more than just one store.
00:10:11:00 – 00:10:40:08
Nate Cangemi
But I think what’s unique about our model is that we’re appointment-based. We will already know a little bit about the customer when they get there, so we’ll obviously know their names. We’ll have engaged with them through a brief sleep survey. So we’ll have an idea of what problems they’re already trying to solve. We may have an idea of what brands they’re inclined towards, or at least what type of mattress that they’re inclined towards.
00:10:40:10 – 00:11:05:17
Nate Cangemi
From the moment they walk in, we’re able to start helping right away. So we feel like that’s something that’s different. You can kind of cut through a lot of, you know, a lot of that initial trust building, as it were when you just blindly walked into a retail store. Then, the other thing that we think is really important is that we want to emphasize a couple of things.
00:11:05:17 – 00:11:31:16
Nate Cangemi
The first thing we want to emphasize is that we want to help the customer get in the right frame of mind to make this decision because it’s a monumental decision. Because none of our mattresses are cheap. We don’t have any value categories. So a person that comes to our store is a person who wants to be educated, wants to be empowered, and it is is looking to invest in sleep.
00:11:31:16 – 00:11:51:08
Nate Cangemi
And so we know that that’s an investment that you need to have the right frame of mind. And so as part of our, I’m a certified sleep science coach. And so as part of our sort of scientific method of, you know, helping people reach this decision, we want to create an environment where they’re relaxed.
00:11:51:10 – 00:12:17:20
Nate Cangemi
So we’re going to have lower lighting. We have the ability to, you know, to bring the lights down low, particularly when they’re on the mattresses. Before even being fitted for a mattress, we’re gonna invite the customer to enjoy a complimentary massage in our massage chairs. We have these beautiful Japanese massage chairs that are just. They’re just really, really, really enjoyable.
00:12:17:22 – 00:12:47:04
Nate Cangemi
And again, we’re not going to insist that they do it, but it’s just going to be an offer. And again, the intent of it is just to help them relax a little bit and get in a frame of mind that’s a little closer to how they are when they actually go to sleep. The second thing we’re going to emphasize is the fitting aspect, in particular, fitting them for a pillow prior to going out and looking at mattresses.
00:12:47:06 – 00:13:22:24
Nate Cangemi
A pillow represents 30% of the sleep experience, and the pillow really needs to be specifically matched to the type of sleeper they are and the type of firmness that they like. So after going through this brief massage, kind of just relaxing, we’re going to we’re going to fit them for a pillow, kind of in tandem with finding out what kind of feel they’re inclined towards if they are more plush, medium if they’re if they’re more of a firm.
00:13:23:01 – 00:13:46:00
Nate Cangemi
And then, once we have that, we’ll be much more educated on what’s going to be right for them. Then, we can go out and start experiencing the mattresses. And then that’s what I’d say. I guess that’s one other thing that we’re going to emphasize: we want them to experience the mattress.
00:13:46:02 – 00:14:06:24
Nate Cangemi
That’s probably to me, the biggest issue I see when it comes to retail mattress buying. I don’t think people are comfortable lying down in front of a stranger because it’s kind of a vulnerable position to be in, right? But with us, in order to get in the massage chair, you have to take your shoes off.
00:14:06:24 – 00:14:26:20
Nate Cangemi
So we’re going to give you socks, we’re going to get you in a place where you can get comfortable in that mattress. We’re going to turn the lights down low. I’m going to step away and let people just experience that. You know, it’s not just simply butt testing the mattress allowed. We don’t, you know, no CPR.
00:14:26:22 – 00:14:30:01
Nate Cangemi
That’s not how you that’s not how you buy a mattress.
00:14:30:03 – 00:14:30:09
Kathryn Greene
Yeah.
00:14:30:09 – 00:14:47:20
Nate Cangemi
And, one other thing we do, which we think is a nice touch, is, prior to them getting on the mattress, we’re actually going to sheet it so that we give them a more realistic feel of what that mattress is going to feel like with, with sheets. And then, of course, it also introduces them to our sheet line.
00:14:47:22 – 00:15:20:16
Nate Cangemi
And we’re going to emphasize adjustable. So all of our mattresses are shown on adjustable. And I’m a big believer in adjustable. I personally think everybody should have an adjustable just so you have at least the option of changing your sleep position, because our bodies change from day to day. And having that option can help you capture those few additional hours of sleep each month, which compound and make for a better quality of life.
00:15:20:18 – 00:15:26:16
Nate Cangemi
So that’s kind of, I apologize for being long-winded, but that’s kind of the overview of the sales process.
00:15:26:16 – 00:15:44:18
Kathryn Greene
Yeah. No, that’s great. I was like, I want to try one of the massage chairs. It sounds fabulous. Yeah, but it does sound, you know, in all seriousness, it does sound like you really are setting yourself apart from other retailers in the space and really personalizing the experience and not just being a bunch of white boxes with white walls and this very stark lighting.
00:15:44:18 – 00:15:47:04
Kathryn Greene
So, definitely a departure. And
00:15:47:04 – 00:15:49:06
Kathryn Greene
So where is your store?
00:15:49:08 – 00:15:53:10
Nate Cangemi
Yeah. So we’re in North County, San Diego, in the city of Carlsbad.
00:15:53:10 – 00:16:03:04
Nate Cangemi
Actually, there isn’t a mattress store in the town of Carlsbad proper, and it’s it’s a town of 140,000 people.
00:16:03:06 – 00:16:04:04
Kathryn Greene
Wow. Okay.
00:16:04:04 – 00:16:09:11
Nate Cangemi
And it does not having mattress store, they have to go to either Encinitas or San Marcos.
00:16:09:13 – 00:16:09:20
Kathryn Greene
Wow.
00:16:09:20 – 00:16:25:11
Nate Cangemi
For them, it is a ten to fifteen-minute drive, whereas I’m probably five. I’m less than ten minutes from everybody because I’m right in the middle of Carlsbad. We were really strategic about where we wanted to be.
00:16:25:11 – 00:16:27:10
Kathryn Greene
Congratulations on the store.
00:16:27:12 – 00:16:28:04
Nate Cangemi
Thank you.
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