Running the mattress business the old fashion way

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Ron Trzcinski runs the Original Mattress Company, a Cleveland based establishment with about 11 factories and 100 mattress stores spread across the Midwest. His experience in the business is a good 40 years, nearly, and this includes some 18 years with Sealy Corp. Despite the changes in the industry, Trzcinski still applies the most basic concepts in mattress selling and is regarded highly in the business for his expertise.

Trzcinski wanted to demystify the process of buying a bed. He said he didn’t like the practice of manufacturers selling basically the same product with different names and fabrics through different retailers, making it hard for consumers to compare. Nor did he like high-pressure sales tactics or the fake urgency of some retailers’ markdowns.

So he adopted a nine-point philosophy for the company, emphasizing such qualities as excellence, value, courtesy and honesty. It’s posted in Original Mattress Factory stores and underscored in an orientation video shown to new employees.

Transparency in the manufacturing process is important to him, too. Customers are shown cutaway models of each mattress’s construction, along with models of the innersprings and the box springs. In the factories, customers can watch the manufacturing process — machines quilting fabric for covers and employees assembling layers of padding and springs, stitching the binding that joins the tops and sides and upholstering the box springs.

Customers also can see some competitors’ mattresses alongside one made by the Original Mattress Factory, all with the layers peeled back so they can compare what’s inside.

Trzcinski has stuck with the old ways, eschewing trendier viscoelastic ”memory” foam and air mattresses for innerspring types and a few models with latex or polyurethane foam cores. He sees problems with the newcomers’ performance, he said, and they just don’t meet his value standards.

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