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Online and in-store
Mattress Online won Online Bed Retailer at the 2021 Bed Industry Awards
Steve Adams on agility, understanding customers, supporting suppliers and why he wants physical stores The past two years has seen enormous growth for Mattress Online (MO). After a fairly stable three years of orders of about 55,000 a year and sales of around £15m, business boomed in 2019/2020 and hasn’t stopped in the past year. Orders in 2019/2020 (to the end of July) jumped to 83,000, with sales of £22.9m as physical stores suffered lockdowns before leaping to 124,000 and £41.5m in 2020/2021, with a 28% increase in profits at £4.1m. Staff increased by 60% to 68, including the creation of four team leader positions filled by promoting from within, and new head of marketing and finance roles. ‘There has been a marked shift in attitude in shopping online, irrespective of product. That’s certainly going to help us retain first-time customers, and we are one of the leaders in peak delivery and they will remember that. I’m confident of that,’ says Steve Adams, Mattress Online ceo. When stores re-opened last April, you might have expected MO to see growth slow as consumers returned to trying out mattresses in-store. Not the case. ‘It grew. That completely threw me – the
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Interiors Monthly January 2022
number of orders coming in and the average order value. I didn’t expect that at all. I had a TV campaign over Easter when stores were thinking of re-opening and I thought what a waste of money that was, but it wasn’t. Things stayed steady up until mid-summer – our figures kept getting bigger and bigger. A lot of people then decided: “We don’t want to buy direct online, we want to go to a
Steve Adams
shop,” so they waited for shops to re-open, perhaps to do their research before buying online. There was a bit of showrooming – we can’t deny that isn’t happening. That’s a challenge for the whole high street.’ Monthly orders dropped slightly to between 10,000 to 11,000 as shoppers waited for Black Friday events (MO operates a Black November
