Moving homes often goes hand in hand with buying a new mattress.
Talk about the sleepy suburbs and it’s music to Sam Prochazka’s ears.
Those so-called sleepier bedroom communities — newer subdivisions in both greater Edmonton and the metropolitan Calgary region — are spurring growth for GoodMorning.com, an Edmonton-based mattress manufacturer and one of the first online bed-in-a-box companies in the world.
In 2020, GoodMorning.com found that 50 per cent of all its Edmonton-area mattress sales were in the region’s newer neighbourhoods with none of those communities more than 15 years old. In greater Calgary in 2020, again with communities no more than 15 years old, they found that accounted for 30 per cent of all their sales there.
“We always knew that when you move or when you buy a new home, you need to set up. Usually people are changing stages of life, so if they’re moving into a larger home, they have more bedrooms and need more mattresses,” said Prochazka, the company’s founder and CEO. “What we didn’t realize until we pulled this new data out was just how stark that is.”
The key takeaway, said Prochazka, is that these newer neighbourhoods represent a disproportionately high proportion of its sales and now GoodMorning.com will look at additional ways to reach out to those potential customers in both cities.
But being an online company, GoodMorning.com said it doesn’t expect to change its model and go to pop-ups or retail stores in those neighbourhoods. Stores mean rent, staffing and other associated costs. Prochazka would rather put this money to creating better products and keeping mattress costs down.
He also said buying a mattress online doesn’t put GoodMorning.com at a disadvantage. They’ve launched a Mattress Matchmaker quiz that matches customers to the right mattress using tens of thousands of data points, and Prochazka said the quiz gets better with time as increased usage expands its knowledge base.
“That allows us to make recommendations to our customers based on their sleeping preferences and to deliver better outcomes than they would receive in traditional retail stores,” he said.
Online Mattress Revolution
As to how an Edmonton company would become Canada’s largest independent online mattress retailer, Prochazka refers to a retail purchase experience gone bad.
Some 10-plus years ago, needing a new mattress, Prochazka had a “highly sub-optimal” in-store experience.
“I don’t think folks wake up on a Saturday morning with that spark in their eye just itching to get to the mattress store,” he said. “I think, generally speaking, that old way (of buying) is an experience most people kind of dread.”
With his entrepreneurial bent, he started what is now GoodMorning.com, saying he thought it was an opportunity ripe for the taking.
“Shortly after we started, we created the at-home risk-free trial,” said Prochazka. “We were the first in the world to actually do that. We invented the whole notion of buying a mattress online, trying it, and if you don’t like it you can return it. That idea, which is now so synonymous with the mattress-in-a-box world, was invented here in Edmonton at our company.”
GoodMorning.com mattresses are manufactured in Canada, though none are made in Edmonton. Its Logan & Cove line is manufactured in Calgary.
Award Winning
GoodMorning.com’s Douglas mattress has been voted Canada’s 2021 Product of the Year in the Mattress-in-a-Box category. The consumer survey on product innovation performed by Kantar — a global leader in consumer research — polled 4,000 Canadian shoppers. The Douglas line, a medium-firm mattress that offers a balance of support, comfort, and pressure-point relief, is GoodMorning.com’s most popular mattress line.
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