Drew and Jonathan Scott are best known for their work renovating and selling homes across a variety of shows on HGTV. The Property Brothers recently turned their attention to one particular room in the home – the bedroom – with the goal of helping consumers improve their sleep. The brothers dive into their new Scott Living line of mattresses, which are available now through NMG Members’ stores.
Interested in learning more about the Scott Living line of mattresses? Check out their brand page on MemberNet, or reach out to their team directly at nationwide@adventurematt.com.
Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Independent Thinking Podcast and typically when I do these, I feel like I like to give my guests the opportunity to introduce themselves. I don’t know that I have to this time. I feel like anyone watching listening might know who Drew and Jonathan Scott are more commonly known as the Property Brothers. Scott Brothers, I appreciate you both taking the time and hopping on and sharing more about the Scott Living line of mattresses with us today. Really appreciate it.
Drew Scott: Thanks for having us. I mean, I know you invited me to join and Jonathan’s just sort of third wheeling, but it’s fine.
Jonathan Scott: It’s totally fine. It’s my life.
Jonathan Scott: I think it’s funny, you have this strange phenomenon with us as well where people recognize our voices. If we go to Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that and they’ll hear our voices from two aisles over and they’ll come running over and ask us about their kitchen plans and things like that. So this is great for a podcast because anyone listening to this, hopefully you’ll be able to tell who’s Drew and who’s Jonathan.
Rob Stott: Right? That’s a true test of fandom right there. And one of you go a little higher octave than the other.
Drew Scott: It’s funny, I actually am just coming off of a cold, so I’m sure you love being as close to me, Jonathan. But Jonathan usually has the bassier voice, but I think right now I might be just a little…
Jonathan Scott: He’s got a little…
Rob Stott: Just throwing people off. A little bit of tiredness too. A new father Drew, is that right?
Drew Scott: That is right, yes. Piper is actually eight weeks today.
Rob Stott: That’s incredible. Congratulations.
Jonathan Scott: This is actually the perfect podcast to ask. How are you sleeping?
Rob Stott: That’s exactly what I was getting to. Yeah. See that. I know. Might as well talk about that. Are you getting sleep?
Drew Scott: Oh, oh, I’m getting some sleep. And at least when you’re a tired parent, all you really need is the perfect mattress to be on because a minute here, 10 minutes there, you need the best you can get. But Piper’s amazing. Linda’s the trooper. She’s the one obviously taking the brunt end of this and feeding and waking up in the middle of the night to feed. But I love it. We have, our toddler is two years old, Piper’s eight weeks old, so we have this little dynamic duo.
Rob Stott: Awesome. Well again, just appreciate you both hopping on, excited to dive into this. Like you said, great segue, sleep, to be able to talk about mattresses. Obviously people recognize the name from HGTV and Property Brothers and all the spinoffs and the renovations and selling of property. What got you into mattresses?
Jonathan Scott: Oh man. Well, we’re sleep snobs. That’s the first thing years and years ago, because we’ve been doing our shows now for 14 years and it was only a couple years into it where we decided we wanted to get into the product business thing. We really put the time and the effort into understanding what makes a home better, what makes people get more out of their home. And I remember, and we’re total nerds when it comes to the data, and we were looking at it and we’re like, oh my gosh. You realize there’s one piece of furniture in the house that you use more, you spend a third of your life on…
Drew Scott: A third of your life.
Jonathan Scott: Lazy people spend even more than that, but it’s the bed, it’s the mattress, and nothing can affect your week more than if you get a bad sleep or you wake up and you’re not refreshed, you’re sore.
So we started breaking down what are the things that make mattresses great? What are the things that make mattresses bad? And it was pretty easy to reverse engineer an incredible mattress. And to date, we’ve sold over a million of our Scott Living mattresses, which is incredible. And I love the stories we get from people who say how it’s affected their life in a positive way.
Drew Scott: They haven’t had a good sleep in years and not that we’re making medical claims that people will tell us I have this condition or even for myself, I have a lower back condition. And some people say they go to a hotel to get a great night’s sleep, I don’t. When I come back from a hotel, I finally get a good night’s sleep on our mattress. So it’s just with what we do with our brand and Property Brothers and everything is trying to help families.
We want all families to love where they live and to feel like they’re in a safe, happy, healthy home, and affordable home. And it’s exactly the same with their furniture, especially a mattress. A mattress is a very big ticket item. Some people will try and cheap out and buy a cheap couple hundred dollars mattress online and that’s not going to give you the support you need. But now we’ve been able to help, I don’t think John said, over a million people get a great night’s sleep at an affordable price.
Jonathan Scott: Well, and nothing is more satisfying than having someone who’s purchased a Scott Living by Drew and Jonathan Mattress and then they come back to get another one because maybe they’re remodeling or want one for the guest room now or whatever it might be. That’s the biggest compliment is when somebody returns and gets another.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely. And you guys mentioned it, the number growing too. As we get this brand into nationwide member stores, obvious and apparent listening to you talk about them, you’re heavily involved in the building and production of these mattresses. Talk about what it was like getting up to speed on this industry. Did you know a lot about mattresses before you got into it or what was that like for you?
Drew Scott: No, I mean Jonathan and me are, we’ve always been nerds for the details. I mean, I’m the guy, I think you’re the same, but I’m the guy that no matter what I buy, if it was a vehicle or an appliance, I read the entire manual front to back. I read the whole manual because I want to understand what…
Jonathan Scott: What a loser.
Drew Scott: …Everything about it. That’s my date night with Linda.
Rob Stott: Is that what the bedtime looks like?
Drew Scott: Hey Linda, want to go…
Rob Stott: Are you reading manuals for bedtime books?
Drew Scott: Exactly. Oh yeah. I just got a robot vacuum and I just did that. But anyway, so with the mattress it’s the same thing. We wanted to fully understand what are the layers, what makes for a good sleep? Because you hear people all the time, what they mainly say is, oh, I love a soft mattress or I love a hard mattress, but that’s all they know. But in reality, too soft or too hard either way is not a good thing. So what else within you, within the mattress can give you the soft feel but the proper support.
Jonathan Scott: We actually put it out to our fans at one point. I remember when we put it out and we said, what are the biggest issues you have with your sleep, with your mattress? We get half a million messages a week each on social media from fans, questions, people saying, “I love this in the show”, or “have you ever thought of doing this or what about this product?”
And we actually take all that feedback. We have a team that goes through that, scrubs through there, gets the data, and I remember we looked and one of the biggest things with people saying, well, how do we figure out is it too firm? Is it too soft? How do we stop ourselves from rolling off the side of the bed, because there’s no support in the side of the bed. I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m hot and I’m sweaty and I don’t like it. These are all things that we’ve fixed. You no longer have to worry about that. The different zones we have and the different coil support. We actually called it our twin support zones because I don’t know, maybe it’s a gimmick, but we’re twins, and so we designed everything. And it was funny because our partner said they want to engineer the best mattress.
They believe that if we get behind it, the consumer’s going to get behind it, and it’s true and it worked and we delivered on every single thing that we promised and all of those things. For me, the biggest thing is waking up hot and sweaty. I cannot stand it. That will ruin my sleep. And so using materials that breathe better, that’s how we work with a lot of these materials. We want to make sure we’re bringing a very natural story.
Drew Scott: And a lot of people are also, they’ll say, well, this is your mattress. It’s underneath your sheets so you’re not even touching it. You will feel the difference if you have a quality cover on your mattress and you’ll feel it through your sheets, and also what’s right below that. I mean that’s why we love the idea that you can have that comfort sleep and you layer in the levels of a memory foam or whatever you might have that gives you that comfort on top of the support below. Yeah.
Rob Stott: Well the way you’re talking about it too, apparent that you guys both test these. Do you stress test these mattresses in any way? You talk about twins, I imagine twins like jumping on beds, right? Is that what you guys are doing?
Jonathan Scott: Mom frowns upon us for doing that. But it’s not just us, our whole family as well. Everyone who knows us has a Scott Living mattress. And for ourselves, I use the plush gold hybrid and actually Drew and I are different. You don’t have the same mattress?
Drew Scott: No, I have the hybrid platinum pillow tops. Mine’s a firm though.
Jonathan Scott: But that’s the top of the line mattress that we make.
Drew Scott: Yeah, but this is the thing. You test all the different ones. We’ve had mattresses at sort of all different price points too because we’re trying to make sure that we’re bringing so of people that’s more than what they thought they could afford. But I get a good sleep on all the mattresses. It’s just a little different. Some people like more of a pillow top like I have, and others don’t. But the main thing too, like Jonathan was saying, all the mattresses, you’re not going to have that divot in the middle where you roll into the middle or you’re not going to fall off the edge if you’re too close.
Rob Stott: Well, I feel like there’s something in there too. Do you guys have to extend these? I know the Scott brothers, you guys are tall. That’s why we’re doing this virtual as well. I know you’ve met my colleague Chad Fisher and have a pretty epic picture next to each other. Him being, I’m not much taller than Chad and I don’t even know if I could say taller, but did you have to extend these?
Jonathan Scott: We make everyone look small.
Drew Scott: If you want, we can adjust the angle of our cameras. So we’re looking down at the camera…
Rob Stott: Be more accurate.
Drew Scott: …On the podcast. No, I mean you have standard sizes for beds, right? So we have all our standard sizes, certain things that we will recommend to people for adjustment. If you have an adjustable base, you’ll want to have two of the twin XLs instead of a king because that gives you side-by-side adjustable if you want different, but the mattresses themselves, they’re all your standard sizes.
Rob Stott: No, that’s incredible.
Jonathan Scott: It’s a thickness thing too. A lot of people don’t want a mattress that’s 15 inches thick. You can still have a quality mattress that’s 12 inches thick. You don’t need to go super thick. It’s just all depending on comfort and what people have for their budgets.
Drew Scott: And it’s also analyzing your entire sleep program. You have obviously the mattress is the most important part. You have to have something that provides the support. I love the fact that we also manufacture the adjustable bed bases. I’ve been promoting adjustable bed bases to my friends for like 20 years and they’re like, “What? No way. That’s what you have?” Put that in the hospital and it’s the greatest thing of all time. You combine that with a great mattress, then what touches your skin? The sheets have to be incredible. We manufacture and we’ve sold the same.
Jonathan Scott: Wait, I got to tell you one thing though, with adjustable bases.
So a lot of times people are like, no, that’s for in the hospital. It’s for old people. It’s not for me. Our dad who’s 90 said, no, no. That’s something for old people in the hospital. I’m like dad, one, you’re 90.
Rob Stott: It’s a great outlook.
Jonathan Scott: And two, at my age, I’ve had it since I was in my 30s and we love it. It’s absolutely amazing. Anyway, I thought it was funny.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome.
Jonathan Scott: Now he loves it.
Drew Scott: It was also funny because when we first put one in for mom and dad, they didn’t realize they had put the remote underneath the pillow and they didn’t know it was there. And all of a sudden in the middle of the night, the bed started moving on them and they thought it was an earthquake or something. No, it was you guys.
Rob Stott: Oh no.
Drew Scott: But speaking of the pillow, the pillows, the last part of the sleep system. Making sure you have all these things together. Oh my gosh, it is transformative. How much more refreshed do you feel when you have a great sleep system?
Rob Stott: Well, what’s awesome about everything you’re saying too is it’s a story for the retailer to tell, right? As they’re out there talking about these products, with their customers. On a show floor, we know not a lot of real estate on a retail show floor, especially in the mattress industry. So what’s the why for Scott Living on one of our members in one of their showrooms? What would you tell them?
Drew Scott: I think a really big thing is our faces are on the box. Our branding has our face, and I think that a big part of what we’ve built over the years is a trust with our audience. People watch our shows, they trust our opinion. They love what we do, helping families. So if you see our face in a store, it does make people stop. And then when they look at the details, it was really, really important to us that these mattresses, even if you took our face away from it and our name off of it, these mattresses are the best of the best. And then you just happen to put us on there and it adds one more layer of that trust factor and it really helps people make that purchasing decision.
Jonathan Scott: Well, and there are a lot of companies out there who have come out with gimmick mattresses and they’ve taken away all of the actual beneficial elements of it, and they put all the money into marketing. And it’s great marketing and it’s slick and they sell a ton of mattresses, but at the end of the day, the customer is not getting what they want. We put everything into these mattresses. We engineered incredible mattresses with all the features because we’re in everyone’s living room every single day on our shows. People know us and trust us. And so we’re not willing to jeopardize that trust. And so we put our brand behind it and it’s paid off. So we’ve heard incredible success stories from anyone. And also we don’t sell direct to the consumer. That’s an incentive for us to go through your members because we are promoting that people go to your members and they get their mattresses.
Drew Scott: This is basically when I tell all the members is just say, hey, when I was hanging out with the property brothers, we were talking about mattresses. And it’s just one extra level of it’s making them one of the team. We’re all one big team together trying to help families.
Rob Stott: Great point. Well, one thing, you mentioned the trust. I know eScores are something big in your world. Do you guys know, I know your composites very high, right? Top 10% of celebrities. Do you guys know where you stand and do you…
Jonathan Scott: I’m kind of a big deal.
Drew Scott: Yeah, no big deal. I Do, well, not to mention I’m one point higher than Jonathan, but anyway…
Jonathan Scott: I don’t get it.
Drew Scott: No, but this is the thing…
Jonathan Scott: I’ve had work done.
Drew Scott: We’re not ego driven at all. We don’t see ourselves as celebrities. And even with that kind of a scoring system, the only thing that I take from that is we are right at the top and in that top 10%, 9%. And what I think that means out of every person you could know, celebrity, athlete or whoever it might be, that people recognize us. But there’s a difference. They recognize us because everyone lives somewhere. Everyone wants to be inspired in their home, and they feel like they know us because of our type of shows and helping them make decisions that will help their family. And that’s pretty cool to me to have that kind of recognition.
Jonathan Scott: Well, and it’s one thing as well, you’ll have celebrities who do an endorsement campaign for a furniture line or for something, and that’s great. And these are talented people who do that. We’ve dedicated our entire lives and our careers to making homes better, to making life at home better, to making your home work harder for you so you can get more out of it. And so I don’t think you can even compare to that. We’ve really dedicated to make sure that any product we put out there, and we manufacture over 12,000 products, and we’ve made sure that anything, and I would say of that our mattress program has been the most successful of any of the products that we’ve done. Everything we manufacture has to perform the way we say it’s going to perform. And if it doesn’t, we either fix it or we stop manufacturing it.
Well, the mattresses have definitely outperformed everybody’s expectations.
Drew Scott: And that’s the thing like we were saying too, is we don’t ever just put our face on something. That is not how we work. We’re not in this for a quick buck or an endorsement. We are all hands on deck. Our team, ourselves, and our manufacturing partner, making sure that we know every detail and what’s important to the consumer. That’s the thing that I find funny is when you have brands that have products, they’re not looking at it from what the perspective of the homeowner, what’s important to the homeowner. They’re just looking at something, oh, what’s the new shiny thing I can make money on? This is actually a product that is amazing and it’s affordable.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s something that our members are going to be able to get in front of here in short order at primetime in August in Las Vegas, 11th to 14th, excited to get it on the show floor. Back to back shows. I think it debuted at the last show. We’re getting it on the floor in August again. So excited to have it there. Before we wrap up, we did take the time. We asked members to submit some questions. So we wanted to be able to give them the opportunity. Once we got through all of filtering out everyone that asked you to come stop by their home and offer remodeling advice, we got a few that were still left. But one of which was wanting to know what you guys did prior to your careers as the Property Brothers before you got into home remodeling and home improvements.
Drew Scott: Well, my big dream was to be an actor. So first I want to be a basketball player in the NBA. Wasn’t quite good enough, but I wanted to be an actor.
Jonathan Scott: Or tall enough.
Drew Scott: Or tall enough. Actor and director for me.
Rob Stott: Believe it or not…
Jonathan Scott: I wanted to be a magician. I wanted to be the next David Copperfield. And actually, which is funny when it comes to renovations, that’s how I originally learned woodworking, metal working and fabrication was building magic props.
Drew Scott: It was actually funny seeing over the iterations of his props. They were so heavy in the beginning. He was doing all wood built and then he would get better and better aluminum frame and yeah, so there that’ll be the next thing. You buy a mattress, we’ll do a magic show for you.
Rob Stott: I mean, we’re in Vegas a great opportunity. If you wanted to perform some magic, maybe you get picked up there, someone notices you. I don’t know.
Jonathan Scott: I lived in Vegas for 15 years. That was a wild time. Actually, when we started Property Brothers, I was living in Vegas.
Drew Scott: Here’s a fun fact that not many people know. Before Property Brothers, because we had been pitching ourselves to the network and then we were picked up for Property Brothers. Before that, we had pitched Jonathan for a magic show about him going after a Las Vegas show. Magic show.
Jonathan Scott: Called Smoke and Mirrors.
Drew Scott: And that was making traction. And then I’m kind of glad that we went in the direction of Property Brothers.
Jonathan Scott: I think we did okay.
Rob Stott: It might’ve worked out all right. That’s awesome. Well, Drew and Jonathan, we really appreciate it. I said it at the top. It’s awesome to be able to get you guys on and know that our members have not just a brand that is reliable, but the brand that is you guys behind it. It’s awesome to see just how invested you are in the Scott Living line. And I know our members are excited about the potential and opportunity that’s in front of them, so we appreciate it.
Jonathan Scott: We’re incredibly excited too. I mean everything, you guys are incredible. What an organization, and the members are everything. That’s what drives our business. So we listen to the members and we love the feedback and we love to hear as well what the customer’s saying. So it’s kind of like a all hands on deck effort in order to get this new collection out. So I’m excited to hear what everybody thinks when they see the new collection.
Rob Stott: Awesome.
Drew Scott: Are we supposed to be in the showroom? Are you and me supposed to choose a mattress and we’re just laying on it all weekend?
Jonathan Scott: It’s like an art exhibit. Drew and I are just sleeping on the mattresses and then people can come and look and poke at us.
Rob Stott: Like that Madame Tussauds, but it’s actually you and little did they know.
Drew Scott: Yeah, exactly.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome.
Drew Scott: Well thanks for having us, Rob.
