Blog: After 1,250 bedding columns, it’s time to wrap up good run

We all know that things are changing rapidly in the bedding industry. And now I’m adding to the change: I’m wrapping up my 37-year career at Furniture Today. It was a good run.

I’ve been writing this column for about a quarter of a century. I spent five years on the bedding beat from 1985 to 1989, and then I returned full time to the beat in December of 2001, and have been here ever since. In that time I’ve written about 1,250 bedding columns. I know that my column is the first thing that many bedding men and women turn to when they receive their new issue of Furniture Today. It has been a privilege to give the bedding industry a voice — my voice — for these many years.

Furniture Today’s dynamic founding publisher, Steve Pond, first asked me to cover the mattress beat back in 1985. “Is this a good thing?” I asked Pond, uncertain if writing about beds would be a smart career move. “It’s a very good thing,” he responded. He was right.

The bedding industry is a community, and a tightly knit one at that, and it soon embraced me, giving me a colorful cast of characters to cover and revealing the power of branding, marketing, advertising and merchandising that bedding players skillfully wield.

In the 1980s, I followed a hard-charging Sealy licensee named Ernest Wuliger ,who battled Howard Haas and the powers at Sealy Inc., eventually gaining control of the Sealy brand in an industry-shaking series of acquisitions. Those times are now long gone, and so are those leaders. Wuliger died at 71 in 1992, while Haas died at 92 in 2016.

More recently I’ve chronicled the rise (and brief fall into Chapter 11) of Mattress Firm, which stands unchallenged as the nation’s largest bedding specialty retailer, and the rise of the bedding e-tailers, which have reshaped the mattress landscape. I also documented Serta’s rise to No. 1 in bedding sales, and Sealy’s return several years later to the No. 1 spot.

I shared my reflections on bedding visionary Earl Kluft, who died at 70 in 2018. I was with the Wizard of Ahhs (a title he liked) at his home in Beverly Hills a few months before his death. That was a difficult visit, but I’m glad I got to say a personal goodbye to that bedding lion.

I’ve waged some important campaigns in my columns, supporting the industry’s embrace of fire-resistant bedding, helping to reduce the length of bedding warranties (overly long warranties discourage mattress replacement, in my view) and promoting the importance of better sleep, not cheaper sleep.

I’ve also worked relentlessly over the years to raise the profile of bedding producers, retailers and suppliers with some 5,000 news stories, hundreds of videos and 15 years of Bedding Conferences.

I appreciate the support and friendship that you have shown me over the years. Together we have built the bedding industry into a powerful force for better sleep and better lives, and we have also nurtured a more professional, respected industry.

Next week, in my column in the Retail Planning Guide, I’ll share a few final thoughts.