COVER STORY
even more than they ever had before. Flexibil- ity was key. In the past, Posh + Lavish would evaluate its stocking levels roughly once a quarter—but Ling suddenly found himself reevaluating every week. At certain points in the year, he estimates that the company was carrying double the inventory it had in 2019 just to keep up with the demand. “If you had your finger on the pulse of your own business and were over-inventory-ing your raw materials, you could actually deliver customers awesome service,” Ling explains. “It was possible; it was just hard work.” While some of the initial uptick in business was likely incidental (retailers needed prod- uct to sell; Posh + Lavish was one of the few companies that could give it to them), what was interesting, Ling says, was watching the way a retailer’s mindset shifted once they had a strong luxury program installed—and real- ized the new opportunity it afforded them.
The Luxury Opportunity
Even before the pandemic, the mattress re- tail landscape was already looking very differ- ent than it had even five or 10 years earlier. “Gone are the days that a retailer can have the same mainstream price points and brands as every other retailer in town,” Ling explains. “If all you do is sell a couple of S brands and mainstream price points, you have likely just watched customers probably slowly but sure- ly, inch by inch, disappear and go online.” If a consumer is looking for a new mattress at a mainstream price point—what Ling de- fines as anywhere between $600 and $1,000, roughly—they have plenty of options for where to buy. Traditional sleep shops will have options at those price points, but so will many big box stores, as well as Amazon and an ever-growing list of DTC online mattress brands. If your store is not offering something notably different, the appeal of convenient shopping and delivery along with a great return policy will be enough to convince some consumers to head online. But that mindset shifts, Ling explains, as you move up the price spectrum: “It’s a tale of multiple worlds. There are $350 mattress buyers and there are $700 mattress buyers— and then there are $3,000 mattress buyers. And how they each operate is just not the same. Because it’s one thing to go out and
10 Sleep Retailer / Spring 2021
“We help retailers offer exquisite feels and extraordinary components while providing a clear reason why the mattress that someone just fell in love with costs more.”
buy something for $600 and if you don’t like it in 90 days, you can send it back and get a credit. It’s a whole other thing if you’re going to invest $5,000 in a mattress. Most of those people, the research has found, say they want to touch it, feel it, stretch out on it and love it—and so they’re going to the store.” So instead of building a new retail strate- gy around trying to recapture the consumers that are primed to buy online, Posh + Lavish is offering an alternative: create a strategy to better serve the consumers who still want to shop in-store. That is, the people who are looking for a really good mattress and are willing to spend more to get it. While this luxury demographic is smaller than that of mainstream price points, Ling believes that it represents greater opportuni- ty—one that has been relatively untapped in recent years. The “race to the bottom” men- tality has put the focus on making “premium” mattresses less expensive; and while that is important for appealing to a certain subset of shoppers, it leaves out the kinds of buyers that want true premium quality.
“Nearly 20 years ago, the introduction of memory foam had the consumer so com- pelled that they paid two to three times what they were spending on a typical mattress just a few years before,” Ling explains. “We forget that as an industry. We de-spec everything to death and somehow think we’re winning out of that. We forget that there’s actually a cus- tomer that wants the best.”
In order to really serve that high-end cus-
tomer, in-store retailers need to have a quality luxury program in place. Without that, they’re not only missing out on an opportunity to up-
sell—they may be inadvertently downselling a consumer that’s really looking for more.
What Makes A Posh + Lavish Mattress Different? Posh + Lavish has built its entire brand around supporting the in-store retailer. In order to do that, the company is dedicated to delivering true differentiation from the product offerings to the in-store presentation to the sales pitch. And that all starts with the mattress itself. “What we build feels like nothing else in the whole world,” Ling says. “And that seems like an overstatement but it’s actually true. Look at our Latex+Memory Foam collection for example, there simply are not other brands who use four and five pound density memory foams over the top of latex—that’s just not a bed that other brands make.” Each Posh + Lavish mattress is designed with simple, high-end materials that most consumers are likely already familiar with: wool, cotton, latex, and high density memory foam. There’s an accessibility in the approach that is key to the company’s success. “We can always step back and say, ‘Here’s what is completely different about this mattress and here’s why it costs more and that’s what’s in it for you,’” Ling explains. “Our components cost five to ten times more than standard off- the-shelf polyurethanes, polyester fibers, ticking and fire socks, but the mattresses themselves are only double or triple mainstream price points. We help retailers offer exquisite feels and extraordinary components while providing a clear reason why the mattress that someone just fell in love with costs more.”
The Latex+Memory Foam Collection In the past year, Posh + Lavish has seen its Latex+Memory Foam collection pick up ex- traordinary momentum in particular. Already a staple in its product mix, this line quickly became the company’s fastest growing cate- gory over the course of the pandemic. “The number of people that are still inter- ested in memory foam or have had memory foam in the last 15 or 20 years is a huge cus- tomer base,” Ling explains. “So taking those consumers and helping them find the next better one or the best one that they can buy in 2021, that becomes our purpose on earth.”
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