How serious are you about growing your retail business?  How far would you go to really deliver remarkable customer service?  Welcome to Retail Gladiators – your challenger is Michael Cote of Sleep Squad.

Sleep Squad is a mattress retailer based in greater Chicago, and is using every weapon in their arsenal when it comes to capturing customers.  Sleep Squad has no need for bricks-and-mortar retail stores.  Why stay in one place when the company can come to you?  Michael Cote has reinvented the mattress business with a fleet of portable showrooms that pull up to a customer’s door and offer a customized mattress-buying experience.  As writer Thomas Prais, recently wrote, “… Cote’s out-of-the-box thinking wasn’t even ‘inventing the wheel’ kind of innovation – he just applied one long existing business model (pizza delivery) to another long existing business model (mattress sales), seasoned a dash of Internet, and Voila!”

Be sure to read Cote’s extensive interview, where he talks about how he started the business, the over-the-top experience the company aims to deliver, and plans for the future. 

Here are just a few critically important quotes from the interview:


“It wasn’t like I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to be the mattress king. I wanted to find the worst experience and turn it into something people could brag about to their friends. After we did that, we tried to figure out everything about shopping for mattresses that people really despised.”

“We carry over 150 different skus. We carry more models than the average mattress store in Chicago, which has about 45 models on the floor. We inventory our selections, which enables us, if someone calls us up at 8 a.m. and needs a mattress by noon, and they need a twin, Simmons, BeautyRest classic pillow top, we can have it there by noon, along with two or three other very comparable selections.”

“Instead of commissions, we give bonuses based on customer satisfaction, whether there’s a purchase or not.  [When it comes to hiring] We prefer to hire people who have never been in the mattress industry before. We’d rather not spread that cancer.”

“We have a process checklist that our employees go through on every single appointment. So in addition to making sure the jacks are down, and the showroom is level, and the merchandising wall is fully stocked, we also make sure that every single customer introduction is the same. So we explain why the shade is one-quarter closed to begin with, we explain that between showing every mattress we’re going to leave the showroom whether the customer asks us to or not, so the customer can try the mattress in privacy.”

“…we’ll shovel the sidewalk right up to the front door, and that way even if there’s a foot of snow people can put on their slippers and try the beds in privacy and comfort.”

 

These are just a bit of the very revealing insight the article has to offer.  In these days of competition from the Internet and an economy in distress, this kind of extreme retailing may be what is required for ultimate survival.

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