Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Mattress Manufacturer With Explosive Growth: From $15M to $43M

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

What’s happening in the mattress industry?In this episode, we take a close look at a mattress company that’s grown its revenue from $15.7M to $43M. We’ll dig into the numbers, talk about what’s really happening in the mattress world, and discuss why so many brands look alike. Plus, we’ll explore why big companies haven’t bought this one yet. Hope you enjoy it!Listing: Check out this deal here Thanks to this week's sponsor:CloudBookkeeping offers adaptable solutions to businesses that want to focus on growth with a “client service first” approach. They offer a full suite of accounting services, including sophisticated reporting, QuickBooks software solutions, and full-service payroll options.Get more deals like this every week. Subscribe to our NewsletterSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

So I think that begs the question, is there any real differentiation that occurs within the product type? Okay, where do you guys sit in the market of mattress manufacturers? To triple the top line and lose a million dollars of margin of real dollars is amazing. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I'm Mills Snell, one of your co-host. Me and Michael talk about a fascinating company today. I don't think we've ever done one of these, which we're continuing to try and mix it up and find unique deals and this one is one of those for sure. It's a mattress manufacturer and they have had

explosive growth. It's unbelievable. They triple the business in three years. They've only been around five years. They get up to 40 plus million dollars in revenue, but they have declining margin. So we talk about why would that be the case? Very, very red ocean, lots of competition. We're scrolling Amazon midway through the episode looking at mattresses and trying to figure out, is there any differentiation in this market? Why does this business need outside capital? Who is the right type of buyer for it. It's really fascinating to look at markets that are kind of this transparent and this competitive and try and go, how in the world does somebody make this work? And this business is on declining margin, even as they triple the top line. So it's just really fascinating. I think

you'll really enjoy the episode. Stick around for a quick word from our sponsor. All right. Taking a quick pause here. I have something to tell you. This is Michael. I hate bookkeeping. I hate bookkeeping. I hate doing HR. I hate doing all that kind of stuff. But for bookkeeping, I have found a solution. It is my friend Charlie's business called cloudbookkeeping.com. So that's cloudbookkeeping.com. They are your perfect partner if you want to get bookkeeping out of your hair and focus on making your company, your customers happier and more successful. So please give them a call, call Charlie, cloudbookkeeping.com. Tell them we sent you. They're a great way. If you're a business buyer, if you're a business owner, you're tired of hassling

with getting your bookkeeping done. He's got a whole, fleet of people that are well trained and work for him. He's located here in St. Antonio, so I can tell you because of that, he's awesome. And they're a great partner for you to potentially call to help with all your bookkeeping needs so you can do the important stuff in your business rather than worry about getting your books right. So give Charlie a call, cloudbookkeeping.com, and now back to the episode. Mills, I have some bad news. I'm disappointed.

We don't have 100% beard anymore. I shaved. I'm so disappointed. I mean, I felt like I looked really good with the beard, but I also feel like there's, I think there's three types of people. There's people that are always without beard. There are people that are always with beard. And then there's the people that kind of go in between.

And I think I'm the in-between person. Yeah. Like, you know what? Keep people guessing. I don't know. Is Michael going to have a beard this month or not? My wife would tell you I like change. I like when things are changing.

So there you go. Speaking of change and bad non-sequiturs, I brought a deal that's a bit different than anything we've looked at. So let me pitch you on this. And then you can tell me if you hate it or not. Okay. So this is actually, for once it's not listed on a broker. It's not listed on a direct listing site. It is something really interesting.

And as we get through it, I think you'll see why I think it's a drink. but it's brokered by a goddessman company, which appears to be a broker, still listed as available. I actually first looked at this over a month ago, and it is still on the market. So it is a mattress manufacturer, and they also sell accessories, and it's located in the southern United States, which to put a pin in that, by the way, I got an argument on Twitter this morning, people arguing whether Texas is in the south or not. And I was like, come on.

like Texas is further south than all of the south. How is Texas not in the south? So anyway, bunch of you guys are but you're not as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, you got that right. So this is located in the southern USA. So I got to assume since it's capitalized southern,

it's somewhere Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, maybe Florida, Georgia. Florida's also not part of the south. Just, just to clear on that. Wait, oh, were you just arguing Florida is not part of the south? Yeah, yeah,

they're totally different. like Texas. You're in a totally different category. What about North Florida? Like all those Pensacola people and I still just Florida's their whole it's a wild breed, man. They're totally different. All right. We'll put a pen in this and we'll save it for our future geography podcast. All right. So for over five years, this company has been manufacturing and known for selling high quality mattresses and adjustable beds at affordable prices. Manufacturing is done both internationally and nationally. U.S. production is diminished supply chain problems and remove tariff issues. The company has over 50 branded skews and over a thousand

accessories. Revenue is driven by online sales through both Amazon and Shopify. Business is also expanding in the B2B vertical. This company's home office and manufacturing facilities in the southern region of the United States. The company has talented ownership, management, and staff. Ownership is seeking an equity partner to expand and fund the company's future growth. Owners would like to maintain a minority ownership and insist in both scaling the company and reaching aggressive sales projections. So maybe we pause there. There is a very coded language of what they're trying to do with this business and that

translated to who the potential buyer is. But what's your reading on that, those two sentences there? I got to go a little bit further up. I can't imagine a thousand accessories for mattresses even existing. 50 skews is one thing, right? Okay. So you got, you know, every size mattress. there's less than 10.

You've got pillows, maybe. You've got like pillow toppers. You've got probably allergy covers. I mean, but a thousand accessories. What are we talking about here? Well, let's Google it. I'm Googling the term mattress accessories and seeing what comes up. Because this is something I've never done before.

Okay, so you got mattress covers. Those are accessories. You have obviously those ones. I know, I don't know how if your kids are past the bed wedding. There's all kinds of things to protect you against that. Yeah. Now, I wonder if they include accessories being like the frames and stuff like that as well. Yeah, maybe it is.

Maybe it is bed frames. Also, I mean, this company's only been around five years. The last, you know, I would say maybe five to ten years of online mattress selling has been in a huge heyday. And completely, I think, you know, it was an upheaval of the existing mattress industry, which was big box and they were everywhere and they grew geographically by, you know, opening big expensive stores with a lot of inventory. Yeah, we should definitely dig into some of the things I know about the mattress industry. It is, it is fascinating.

And it's, it's one of those industries you run into that's kind of like the, what's another, what's a way of describing it? The glasses industry, like, you know, the whole glasses industry is basically dominated by Luxa So you go into like sunglasses hut or whatever and you think you're choosing from like 40 different vendors. It's all from one company. And like they own like 70% of something. Like they own Ray Bann and everything else around at Tommy Hilfiger glasses. If somebody's selling you sunglasses, they all come from Luxotica.

And so there's similar kind of dynamics going on in the mattress industry where there's all these kind of fake things where it looks like it looks like there's competition. By the way, a similar thing happens in the fireworks industry. everybody has their own labels on everything. Yeah, I think all the stuff comes from like 15 different factories using 10 different designs. Like it's all the same. It's all the same stuff. But you got a high average order value, like to your point,

mattresses and glasses, high average order value. Yep. You probably are buying them, you know, once every five to 10 years. Yep. And maybe glasses a little bit more frequently. And so there's this like rush to grab these customers because it's such an

infrequent purchase. Holy moly. Yeah. Well, let's let's come back to the dynamics of the mattress market and talk about what has happened to this company. So in 2020, they did 16 million in revenue and 5 million in EBDA. In 2021, they did 33 million in revenue and 4 million in EBDA. In 2022, they did 43 million and 3.7 million in EBDA. They tripled in three years and are losing margin. and are getting less profitable. Wow. And this is EBDA. So we don't know.

The big crux of this business. If they are actually cash flow positive or not, they may be growing like crazy. The big thing about this business is customer acquisition costs. And it, I think, has been some of the more expensive ad words, right?

Yeah. You got like Casper and, you know, eight sleep and all these different, you know, people who figured out, I think it's been within the last 10 years that you could actually order a mattress online and they ship it to you and it's vacuum sealed and you. So I think that's the industry we're talking about.

But they manufacture it domestically, which is surprising to me. Yeah. But we're there, they mentioned tariffs. Buy a mattress online. And on Google, it is one, two, three, four, five, six. It's 15 ads before I get to mattress firm. And one, one native organic.

search. Yeah, mattress firm is the first native one. But yeah, it's such a weird dynamic in the mattress industry because how infrequently people buy them. And like, how often do you guys buy mattresses? Like, we buy a new mattress maybe every five to seven years. And I'm going to get totally pilloried by somebody like, that's bad for your back. But no, we're in the same boat. And, you know, like maybe around like a life event, like you, you know, you move and you're like, It's probably dumb to get a new mattress, you know, that kind of thing. So it's such a weird thing where you, and you end up with, you know, maybe just a good time to talk about the weird dynamics of the mattress underdice.

So it's highly consolidated. And then a lot of times you'll see like a mattress firm or like mattress express directly across the street from each other. And those two companies will be owned by the same company. Like they'll be fake competition. And then one of the things that open my eyes to how retail can work. I don't know if you know this, Mills, but basically like if you ever, if, let's say you want to buy a Subaru. Let's say like you're a genius and you want to be a Subaru driver.

Let's say you want to buy a Subaru. Like you can price shop Subaru's because there's only a few different configurations and the stuff they change doesn't matter much. You can go from ABC dealership, right? And they all kind of, you know, you can price shop those. It's impossible to price shop mattresses because what they'll do is you go in and they'll change just like the color of one part of the stitching. on the mattress and that becomes like a totally different skew. Like you can't go into one mattress store and be like, okay, I want a silly posthrapedic and I want number nine and like, like show me your best price on number nine. Cause you go to the other place.

They're like, no, no, no, we don't have number nine. We only have number nine 99. Yeah. But there's, so that's why we can't price up there. It's actually the same, maybe aesthetically slightly different or they, there's like misnomer's associated with it. Uh, yeah. Or they just like, if one of the tricks was like a better. way from you describe it is they would change just some tiny and perceptible part of the skew of the

mattress and create an entirely new skew so two mattress shops could both be carrying sea leaf for example and like they would are temporepetic and like it would be the identical mattress with a slightly different change to one aspect of the mattress and that caused the entire mattress to be a different skew so it made it impossible for use a consumer to price shop and therefore both of these both of these firms then did kind of what what you would expect, which was go charge monopoly prices for these mattresses. And that's, you know, to some extent, why there's so many of these damn mattress stores. It's interesting. I mean, the dynamics make it hard.

Like, you can't ever compare apples to apples. Exactly. Yeah, it's genius when you look at it. So, I mean, before the days of online mattresses, right, the whole scheme was you had a handful of mattress stores that would specialize in this stuff. or you had furniture stores that would carry it. And furniture stores are mostly dead these days, right? Or, and I don't know if it was still that way when you're a kid,

but also the department stores would have big bedding areas. They would have like, you'd go to the third floor and it was like half of it was mattresses. And the reason was is because they knew a couple things. One, people wanted to sit on a mattress before they bought it because they know they're gonna spend half their life on it. So they want to be comfortable. They know that customers can't price shop.

It's a big enough price point that they can finance it and make money on the financing, like an auto dealership does. And because of those dynamics, where it was such a personal choice, people would take these $500 mattresses and sell them for $3,000. So it was super high margin. So everybody wanted to be in that business. And this is all pre like online shopping. But it created this fascinating dynamic where you as a consumer, it kind of always felt to me buying a mattress like you felt buying a car where it's just like, well, okay, I'm getting screwed here. My goal is just to get screwed as minimal as possible and not come back to this place ever again.

That's the same feeling I have buying a mattress every time. Oh, by the way, I sleep on a $3,500 mattress that we got totally screwed on, but my wife loves it. I remember looking at a deal out west at one point, and it was a multi, you know, it wasn't mattress firm, but it was a, it was a, I think they were maybe like 15 to 25, you know, units. And these are very big stores typically. They're very expensive. And, you know, you're talking about like mattress firm and some of these others, they're signing long-term leases on very expensive real estate in order to sell this. It's like, okay, yeah,

everybody's looking at it going, I'm coming for your margin. I can tell you have margin from a mile away. I'm coming for it. Hi, Heather here. When I'm not breaking down deals with these guys, I'm helping people get the right SBA loans for their business acquisitions. Because when you're buying a business, the best financing isn't one size fits all. There's the best rate, fastest to close, the specific loan structure that you need, or a little of all of those things. That's why my company, Vizzo Business Capital works with over 30 different lenders to find you the best funding in less time and with less friction so you can focus on the deal. Sign up for a free live Q&A session on SBA loans at Vizoccap.net, then click Zoom sign up in the top right corner. That's V-I-S-O-C-A-P.

And click Zoom sign up. Yeah, so to your point about real estate, mattress firm got in trouble by having too many expensive leases. They filed Chapter 11 in 2018. And to put it in perspective, they had 2,300 stores as of 2021, and they tried to break 700 of those leases, like a third of those leases to get out of those because they were unprofitable.

And I think that all ties back to the change that happened in the mattress buying industry, which was direct-to-consumer, Casper, Purple, all these types of Satfa, like one of the 85 different online mattress firms that showed up, companies that showed up when I Googled it. So I think that begs the question. Is there any real differentiation that occurs within the product type?

You've got most of these are foam, right? If they're shipping them to you, they don't have springs. They're phone. And I, like my wife, you know, will tell me, hey, we really need one that's like very clean and green and, you know, doesn't off gas, you know, these forever chemicals and stuff like that. that. But is there is there any differentiation between the brands? Because this is a manufacturer. It actually like yeah, this is probably the part of the food chain that is maybe least affected by

these whims of online. But it seems like they're a manufacturer who is just selling direct to consumer not as much wholesale. They mention it as like an opportunity. Yeah. And I think that's the very big first thing you want to understand. And this is like, okay, where do you guys sit in the market of mattress manufacturers. Like, what is your differentiation? What are you doing, you know, in terms of having some sort of defensibility? Because at least looking at the numbers here, it looks like these guys have rushed headlong into the online mattress selling market.

And as it keeps getting more and more competitive, Amazon, Google, Facebook are all incredibly efficient marketplaces at making everyone pay the maximum. possible dollar for customer acquisition over time. And it looks like at first glance, this is a relatively undifferentiated product and all the profits are getting eaten up by the billionaire platforms. And that's what I would want to understand. Like what, what are we doing here? Like is this?

To triple the top line and lose a million dollars of margin of real dollars is just amazing. Yeah. Well, and it's EBITDA. It's not your real dollars. Yeah. Yeah. They could, you know, if they have a bunch of money. of equipment and that they're depreciating, like they could be showing net losses on all this stuff.

And like, I think that's that's the key thing here. What has caused this growth? How is it, are they just spending more on meta and Amazon ads? They do say here they're on the Amazon platform. So they're definitely having to pay to promote what they're doing. But that is totally what it smells like is going on here. Well, and you alluded to this earlier. And we went a different direction first. But they're looking for a growth equity partner. And they say they want a partner to help fund the company's future growth. Guess what? That means growth is expensive and the business is capital consumptive, you know,

in terms of the path to growth. Yeah. Well, they're an integrated manufacturer and direct-to-consumer thing. Like, ugh. And you're competing with, you're competing with mattress firm who's just, you know, restructured through bankruptcy and has all these economies of scale. and you're a startup. So, yeah, I'm with you.

Unless there's some sort of niche that these guys have carved out, like, it's, it doesn't smell great at first, at first glance. And then I think what you have more recently now is you have more of these not just kind of, I'll say, like, dumb, you know, foam mattresses, but like the smart mattress where you've got, you know, analytics integrated into them. You've got temperature control. You've got, you know, look, look at the, just look at television ads, right? They're spending so much money educating you and trying to differentiate on expensive TV ads.

That tells you something, right, about their customer acquisition model. And you're going to be a small fish competing against big fish, and you're going to be a small fish competing against VC backed companies who have actually probably some product differentiation with like a smart mattress. Oh my God. Look at the Red Ocean. I just pulled up Amazon. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. So for those of you that aren't following it, Amazon has become quietly making an enormous amount of money through advertising. So half the stuff that you see when you're looking and trying to buy something on Amazon, you're getting shown that because the, because Amazon is having the supplier pay to promote their stuff. stuff. And so you see it and you see it as a choice. So Amazon and Google have basically like gone headlong together. And like I search mattresses here in in Amazon and the entire first page of results is paid. Wouldn't you love to know. So like look at this. Necter, right, is a is a, is a name I've actually heard of. But what do you think they're paying for this massive banner at the

top versus all these others? There's a couple names I recognize like Casper's down there. But then there's so many that are just generic. Yeah. You know, queen mattresses, Sienna, you know, like other just kind of generic, non-descriptive names. Well, to Bill's point, when you see on Amazon two pictures of a product that looked like it came from the same factory, but have a different brand name, they're pretty much coming from the same factory. And they're, you know, I think it's a sign here that these things all look the same.

And based on that, it's like, oh, like. Look at the review volume, too. I mean, all of these things, this one has 156,000 reviews. Right. Most of them have tens of thousands of reviews for a $300 mattress. Yeah. Wow. This one says 6,000 of these were bought in the past month.

I love how Google, or Amazon going to tell you how big the market is for stuff. Yeah. Man, this looks like, look at this place. Look at this one. It's called Sursper. It's like a Chinese knockoff of Canc. Casper. I think that's even the same color scheme.

Oh, here's the greatest sign that this is a red ocean, Mills. Like, this one is called Payless Here Mattress Brand. That's their name. That's just like, and look, it is, it is less. It's $100 less than the others. Oh, man, you know, like, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Olympics are going on right now. And all the, uh, they designed all these beds designed to make sure the Olympians have fewer hookups in the rooms because they're cardboard beds.

But like I think those would look more comfortable than these things. These are horrible. Oh my God. There's a temperatech mattress for $191. I thought temperatech was like a premium brand. Oh my gosh. Well, I mean, they are probably for the spring mattresses that if, you know, if you do it right, it is, it is way more expensive from a manufacturing and a cost perspective than these.

And I don't think they are getting sold online. I think you've got to go in store. which is why I think there will always be a place for those physical stores, but the footprint, like you said, is probably getting cut by, you know, about a third, like mattress firm and others.

The other thing that is interesting, this is anecdotal, but I had a friend who worked for one of those mattress stores in high school. And one of the things that they have to do is, you know, they have a return policy. Like if you, if you sleep on it,

you know, within the first two nights and you don't love it, we'll take it back. But they can't resell those. So they have to take them back, but it's been in somebody's home. They can't like put it back in their inventory. And so my friend had this like kind of side racket going on where anytime they had a really expensive like an $8,000 mattress get returned like that, he would tip somebody off and they

would go because they don't they don't put them back in inventory, but they also kind of have to be smart about how they dispose of them because you can't just have like an $8,000 mattress on sale for $1,000. And then you realize, oh, wow, okay, this thing has very, very little cost actually associated with it. So he had this little sideline business where he would help people source these really expensive mattresses like a few times here. And he would take a cut. There's a great line that people talk about when they kind of just think about stuff like that. You know, it's like capital finds a way. You know, it's like this idea that money always seems to find a way to be made.

And people are there. So I love stories like that. We're just like, oh, and you run across them when you're looking at buying businesses. Like you end up with just like seeing these guys, you were like, like random CPAs. You figured out a way to make $4 million a year just from some little niche that they discovered, you know. And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to file that away as a pattern. I can use at some point in the future. But it's like it, the more I look at businesses, the more I'm just fascinated by the ways, creative ways people figure out how to make money.

Absolutely. Cool. Well, you want to wrap it up on this one? I think, look, I think from a meta perspective, the fact that I first found this a month and a half ago and it's still been sitting and looking for growth is a sign of how I would say most of the private equity and growth equity folks are thinking about the mattress market right now. They probably look at the numbers the way we do and they see the trends that they know about and are scared of getting into a high cap X, blood Red Ocean running into a recession-style business with Made in the USA, that seemingly looks pretty undifferentiated, right? Road to wave probably of the D-to-C stuff coming along has grown up and now is seeing all their profits eaten up by the advertising platforms online. So other than that, I'm sure everybody loves the deal. What do you think? You also wonder, right, there's no 2023 numbers. So is it going to be a little bit of a bait-and-switch? you were like, wow, look at this growth trajectory and all they need is like a little push.

Like their unit economics aren't working with their customer acquisition costs. Like is there something that will tip the scales? No. And then you get, you sign the NDA and you realize 2023 is probably, I don't know, have they even, have they even maintained this level of revenue as things have gotten more competitive. Right. Makes you wonder why. I mean, I guess maybe I'm going to answer this question as I ask it, but why hasn't a bigger

player in the space acquired them and it's probably because it's also commoditized that there's no accretive value to buying something like this like why i mean we're just going to continue to spend more money on customer acquisition and there's not really much differentiation yeah yeah i mean i i was suspect if they had figured out a way to differentiate themselves and carve out a defensible part of the market and there's all kinds of different ways right you can have um organic mattresses a lot a number of ones on Amazon are green tea mattresses to make you think that it's green tea healthy. There's the, you know, the ones where you can change the number to make it softer or stiffer.

Like, we have that one. I've put it to super stiff and never touched it again. Like, it's a total waste of money. But the fact these guys don't talk about that in the teaser and are selling through Amazon a lot. Yeah, that's not good. Brutal. Super interesting, though.

I think if I wanted to dig into this, I think the positive side would be. be to look and say, okay, seemingly smart people and common wisdom is don't dig into it. Don't go into a market like this. A lot of times when you see common wisdom, that's a chance for you to be an actual real contrary and go figure out a way to make money that everybody else is just riding off. And so, you know, that's the one part of me that's like, okay, could you get creative on this and maybe figure out how to make it work? Maybe.

Maybe. Are there easier ways to make money? Probably. Well, and this is like we've talked about, we're scratching the story. surface, but doing a deep dive on this, you would learn a ton about, you know, a bunch of different things that are applicable across, you know, multidisciplinary learning. Like, you know, you just learn about the restructuring a mattress firm that, that snowball effect, like signing the NDA on something like this is very informative, like really good education. Totally. Cool, man. All right,

well, I got to run. This is awesome. I love talking about this one. You and I, you and I have the most business nerd out kind of upset. So I love the way to go. Yeah. Cool. I'm thumbs down on this one. It's been time on other stuff. But it's super fascinating. And if you're a business dirt, the digging into the dynamics of the mattress industry is just fascinating. Like you learn so much about human psychology and all the concepts of microeconomics show up there. So if you're a nerd, definitely check it out. All right. Do we have an ask for everybody? Sign up for our newsletter. We're desperate for subs. You can go to acuanon.com, tell your friends about it. We're sending out deals. So, like, if you want deal flow, they're in the newsletter. And I know Gustavo, who is quietly listening and shaking his head, is doing a great job producing that newsletter.

So if you want to see cool deals and have an email to you, including the ones we're talking about on the show, sign up for our newsletter on our website. It's free. And we throw some ads in there, everyone's a lot of pay for the bills. So awesome. Well, we'll catch everybody next time.