Tempur Sealy made a splash at PrimeTIme in Orlando, showcasing not just its private label lines – Golden Elegance and Crown Jewel – but also giving Nationwide Marketing Group Members a sneak peak of the new Stearns and Foster line that will launch later this year. Scott Warlick and Brent Muse spent some time on CenterStage to share more about these programs, as well as the Amplify gallery program, which can transform a Member’s retail space in as little as two days. This turnkey makeover, which helps optimize on-floor SKUs and the ambiance of the store, lets retailers offer an elevated customer experience. Plus, it’s been shown to increase overall business by 25-30%.

Amy Croom: Good afternoon and welcome back to CenterStage here at PrimeTime in Orlando. I am very excited to be joined from our friends from Tempur Sealy. Scott Warlick, Brent Muse, thank you very much for joining me today.

Brent Muse: Yeah. Thank you for having us.

Scott Warlick: Thanks for having us.

Amy Croom: Yeah, you are great. I know it has been a crazy couple days, the show floor opened up this morning. There’s been a lot of traffic and a lot of members. So tell us how are things going at Tempur Sealy?

Scott Warlick: Oh, Amy, they’re going great. We’ve had tremendous traffic here, thanks to everyone at Nationwide. It’s so good to see our retailers and all our friends really after the past few years that we’ve been through. Seeing them on a monitor on your computer is a little bit different. We’re having really great interaction. The meetings yesterday were great. A lot of good feedback, lot of good responses. You can tell how well things are going by the responses you get. Right?

Amy Croom: Yeah.

Scott Warlick: And we’ve heard a lot of good questions, feedback, and lot of energy in the booth, so very exciting and thank you guys.

Amy Croom: Well, I am so glad to hear that. And you said there’s a lot of excitement in the booth and there definitely is. I had a chance to wander over there a little bit earlier and there are just members on members. So what is driving all that traffic?

Scott Warlick: Well, everyone wants to lay down, they get tired and working is laying down. Anyway. No, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Brent Muse: We have a lot of great things going on. We have brand new product, we have our Sealy product, our private label Sherwood Encore product. We have a brand new Stearns & Foster room on the second floor.

Amy Croom: I’ve heard.

Brent Muse: Very excited about. We can talk about that later as well. But we have a lot of awesome things, lot of great cash back specials I’m very excited about.

Amy Croom: That is fantastic. Definitely, let’s talk about Stearns & Foster. You’ve got a private room on the second floor, and how did we get Stearns & Foster here? This is amazing. This is fantastic.

Brent Muse: Absolutely. Yeah. It is launching later this year. This is a very, very early sneak peek. We wanted all the members to see. Everyone at Nationwide, you guys were awesome and partnering with us on that. So we have all the models up there. We have a champagne wall, we have giveaways, we have photo backdrop, the whole nine yards, it’s awesome up there. So if you haven’t seen it, we’d love to have you up there.

Scott Warlick: Have you been up there yet?

Amy Croom: I have not made it up there yet.

Scott Warlick: Okay, get ready to go.

Amy Croom: It’s on my list for tomorrow.

Scott Warlick: Tomorrow. There we go.

Amy Croom: Yes. I cannot wait. I wanted to give the members some time to go in, because once I get in, I’m not leaving. I’m not giving up my space.

Scott Warlick: Oh yeah. You’ll be tired tomorrow. You can just lay down in there, drink champagne.

Brent Muse: Yeah.

Amy Croom: All day long?

Scott Warlick: Done.

Amy Croom: Yeah.

Scott Warlick: All right.

Amy Croom: Yeah, I’ll just tell Hickman. That’s-

Scott Warlick: Oh, he’ll probably be in there too. So you’re good.

Amy Croom: Probably. Wonderful. Well, you also talked about private label lines. We do have the Sherwood Encore line that we’re going to talk about a little bit later in another session. But we also have two other private label lines that we’ve worked on with you, Golden Elegance and Crown Jewel. So I understand that we have about 900 members who are signed on to carry those two lines. Tell us a little bit about how those lines are doing and also why those lines are so successful, and why private label bedding lines are such a boom for independent retailers.

Scott Warlick: Well, it’s exciting for me, because back in 2016, I designed those beds and we put them in mind for all of our independent retailers to have something to compete against everyone else at the marketplace. So what it does as Nationwide retailer, it gives you the advantage in the marketplace to carry something exclusive that you can market exclusively through all of the great things that are done with your marketing department.

Amy Croom: Mm-hmm.

Scott Warlick: And it lets them really compete and sell their own brand in their store. That’s a Nationwide brand.

Amy Croom: Yeah.

Scott Warlick: We had great names, Golden Elegance and Crown Jewel. Crown Jewel is actually a top of the line Sealy name that we had back in early 2000, the late nineties. So we just brought it back and we made it exclusive for our Nationwide folks.

Amy Croom: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Scott Warlick: Yeah.

Amy Croom: Let’s also talk about the Tempur line then, because I know that we’ve seen a lot of growth in the $2,000 plus price range. So what is coming up down the pipe for Tempur?

Scott Warlick: Yeah.

Brent Muse: Yep. Our premium category is growing exponentially compared to the other lines right now, above $2,000 is killing it. We continue to invest in advertising and everything in the back half of the year. Next year we have some very exciting things coming out with our Tempur-Pedic product, our bases, our mattresses. Very, very early sneak peaks, but that will be shown hopefully at the next prime time.

Amy Croom: So in March?

Brent Muse: Yes.

Amy Croom: So one more reason for retailers to make sure that they have March prime time on their calendars?

Scott Warlick: Oh yeah. All new adjustable bases that go with those beds and everything. State of the art,-

Amy Croom: Oh my gosh.

Scott Warlick: … very cool stuff coming.

Amy Croom: Well, we spent a lot of time talking about product, and of course the product is fantastic, but you all are also making really great strides in terms of marketing with your Amplify program.

Scott Warlick: Mm-hmm.

Amy Croom: So I’d love to talk a little bit more about what that is and how it can benefit a retailer as they go to market.

Scott Warlick: Yeah. It’s really a turnkey solution to go to retail. We have come in and we do a complete analysis of your business, how many skews, everything that you have, and we take your store and we really transform it into a turnkey thing for your RSAs, from the marketing to the merchandising, everything. It’s one thing to put rectangles on your floor and think they’re going to sell, but this offers you a very clean solution that helps grow the business. In some cases, we even reduce skews by 20%, but we’ve seen, on a whole Amy, the overall business has gone up about 25 to 30%-

Amy Croom: Wow.

Scott Warlick: … when Amplify is installed in these retailers. Yeah.

Amy Croom: That’s amazing.

Scott Warlick: Yeah, it’s great. It’s a beautiful gallery. We actually, in our space we have a small build out of the store that’s an amplified store that people can come in and see. And we’ve got before and after shots that we can show retailers and they can understand what we can do for them in that area.

Amy Croom: And how long does one of those makeovers generally take to [inaudible 00:06:04]?

Scott Warlick: We’ve got it down now. We’ve got a crew that comes in and they can knock it out in about a day, a day and a half.

Amy Croom: Oh my goodness.

Scott Warlick: We put a Tempur wall up, it looks incredible. But again, we’ve got to build out right in our space they can see it.

Amy Croom: That’s fantastic.

Scott Warlick: Yeah. Yep.

Amy Croom: That’s a great opportunity to, as you said, not just sell a mattress. It’s not a mattress, it’s an experience. And as part of the experience you really need to have the ambiance and the environment to support it.

Brent Muse: Yep.

Scott Warlick: Yeah. And I think one thing we’ve seen, we’ve seen shoppers want to go back in the stores and one thing we tell our retailers, “You got to look at your in-store experience. Because you spend all this money on advertising, whether it be digitally, direct mail pieces, whatever, all this focus to get the consumer in the store, but your in-store experience, it’s everything right now.” So that’s a big part of.

Amy Croom: What else is Tempur Sealy doing to support independent retailers and the independent chain as a home?

Brent Muse: We have a lot of things going on right now, especially with our advertising support. We have our Retail Edge team, which Retail Edge is really activating all of our marketing assets in the field. Really partnering with Nationwide from an ad rocket standpoint, from RWS, financing, we know that’s key in the mattress industry, to really drive customers into the door, conversion rates and also average ticket.

Amy Croom: Yeah.

Brent Muse: So really everything we’re doing and that’s why we have jobs truthfully, is because of the independent retailer and partnering with Nationwide to really support them in that initiative.

Amy Croom: Yeah. Well, that is fantastic. As we look to the back half of 2022, I can’t believe it’s already August, but as we look at the back half of 2022 and start planning out for 2023, what can members and independent retailers expect from Tempur Sealy?

Scott Warlick: Yeah, I think one thing you’re going to see that’s a little bit different, Amy, from 2020, thank goodness in 2021 is in the back half we’re getting back to more of the way things were in 2019. So retailers need to get back out there, they need to promote, they need to advertise, they need to really take advantage of those national holidays, like Labor Day coming up. Because we’re starting to see the seasonality come back the way it was in 2019. It’s definitely different, which is good and bad, but we need to do more of those things that we traditionally did to drive consumers in the store.

One thing we’re going to do is we understand that we’re going to make plans with all of our retailers on how to capture that business. Like Brent said, a lot of it’s through Retail Edge. And where we can attack, we’ll do 360 health checks, we’re going to promote, we’re going to do a lot of national advertising. We talked about the Stearns & Foster line coming out. We’re going to spend 10 times the money that we ever have on Stearns & Foster, and advertise it nationally the same way we did Tempur-Pedic, in the way we do Tempur-Pedic now.

Amy Croom: That’s fantastic.

Scott Warlick: So exciting things to come, we got to partner up and go after it.

Amy Croom: Yeah. So there’s definitely a lot to see and be seen from Tempur Sealy as we look forward to March. So, March show, we’re going to have some new products to look at. We’re going to have some expansions of things, we’re going to have some marketing opportunities, it’s going to be great. And for retailers who weren’t able to join us here in Orlando this week, any advice to them as they’re looking at their 2023 calendars and starting to plan out their travel for next year?

Scott Warlick: Go ahead.

Brent Muse: I would say, start planning your trip to Dallas. We have a lot of great things going on. As we mentioned, we have new product coming out, we have new marketing initiatives. We have a lot of great things in addition to our cash back, our show specials, you can’t miss that. And everybody loves a cash back, so-

Amy Croom: Everybody loves a cashback.

Brent Muse: … we are looking forward to it. Hopefully see everybody there.

Scott Warlick: Yeah. I would add to that. I would say get here early and attend the training seminars. Some of the retailers that have been here that went through a lot of the training yesterday, Brent, Josh Showers and Brandy Micah from our team did about a hour training. We’ve had tremendous response and a lot of takeaways that they can use. So get here early and stay late.

Amy Croom: Take advantage of everything PrimeTime has to offer, we love it. Scott Warlick, Brent Muse, thank you very much for joining me on CenterStage.

Brent Muse: Yeah.

Scott Warlick: Thank you, Amy.

Brent Muse: Thank you.

Amy Croom: And thank you for joining me here on CenterStage at PrimeTime in Orlando. We’ll be right back.