The Company Simmons Bedding is a premier manufacturer of mattress and bed related products, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The company was founded in 1870, and is one of the oldest companies of its kind in the United States. Simmons's flagship brand is Beautyrest . In addition to operating 18 manufacturing facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico, the company licenses its products internationally. According to Simmons press release, net sales for 2005 were $ 855 million, and revenues were $ 1.13 billion in 2007 and $ 1.228 billion in 2013. In 2011, Simmons was ranked third among US mattress manufacturers, with market share 15.7 percent. In 2012, Simmons and his company, Serta International, were acquired by private American equity firm Advent International.
Video Simmons Bedding Company
History
Initial history
In 1870, Zalmon G. Simmons opened his first factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He started by producing wooden telegraph insulators and cheese boxes. He branched out to bed on the bed after receiving a patent for wire-bonding as a debt repayment. In 1876, Simmons became the first manufacturer to mass-produce woven mattress mattresses. This process helped the company produce beds faster and cheaper, and by 1889, with the introduction of spiral springs into woven mattresses, Simmons mattresses dropped from $ 12 to 95 cents, making mattresses more widely accessible. The business was founded in 1884 as Northwestern Cable Company, adopting Simmons Manufacturing Company as its name in 1889. According to company records, in 1891 it was the largest "of its kind in the world".
National business
Zalmon Simmons, Jr., who took over the business after the death of his father in 1910, was to oversee additional growth. In 1916 Simmons began advertising nationwide, starting his first national ad campaign with a double ad on Saturday Evening Post .
In 1919 rapid growth. In response, Simmons acquired a factory in San Francisco, California; Los Angeles, California; Montreal, Quebec; Toronto, Ontario; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Vancouver, British Columbia; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. The following year, Simmons started a new sales arrangement. Instead of purchasing a mattress directly from the retail floor, customers can test the product on the in-store sample, order the mattress through the retailer, and receive direct shipping within the next 24 hours from one of 64 Simmons warehouses. This arrangement reduces the need for retailers to own and store their own product inventory. In 1923, Simmons moved his headquarters to New York City.
The equipment developed by Simmons in 1925 automated the process of grinding the wire and putting it into a cloth sleeve, called encasements. This enables the mass production of a marsupial coil, a type of coil that is only available in a luxury mattress at a very high price. The pocketing coil was the basis for the Simmons Beautyrest mattress brand, introduced in 1925. Although the new manufacturing technology greatly reduced its cost, at the time of introduction the Beautyrest mattress sold for $ 39.50, three to four times more than usual. price for standard wire mattress. Simmons promoted his product aggressively with advertisements that included testimonials from famous people like Eleanor Roosevelt in 1927 and Henry Ford, HG Wells, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi and George Bernard Shaw in 1929. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to promote the brand into the 1930s, through his radio show. Cole Porter mentioned Beautyrest's brand in the lyrics of his 1934 song "Anything Goes".
In 1940, Simmons introduced the Hide-A-Bed, a couch that incorporated a folding spring and a mattress pulled out to form a bed. It became one of the most famous products and was produced until the 1980s. During World War II, Simmons facilities were diverted into military production, making cots, parachutes, bazooka rockets, and other products. In the post-war years of 1947, the company returned to the mattress business and began using advertising to link its products with Hollywood actress artists, including Dorothy Lamour and Maureen O'Hara. A research and development facility was established in Munster, Indiana, in 1957, based on the pioneering human behavior study sponsored by Simmons in the 1930s. In 1958, the company became the first US mattress maker to produce mattresses in king and queen size, an innovation promoted as a "splinting in the bedroom" solution.
Corporate change era
In 1975, the company headquarters of Simmons moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly thereafter, the company's research and development team also moved to Georgia, to a building where it now is Peachtree Corners, but later became an unrelated part of Gwinnett County, near Norcross. In 1995, R & amp; D company moved to a new home, Simmons Institute for Technology and Education (SITE).
Simmons experienced the first in a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions in 1979, when the company was acquired by Gulf Western. Six years later, Gulf Western sold Simmons to Wickes Corporation. Wesray Capital bought the business in 1986, and sold it to Simmons employee shareholding plan in 1989. Merrill Lynch Capital Partners acquired a majority interest in Simmons in 1991, and was sold to Investcorp in about 1996. Fenway Partners bought the company about two years later sold to Thomas H. Lee Partners in 2003.
In the 1990s, the advertisement for Simmons Beautyrest featured a bowling ball dropped on a Beautyrest mattress and a standard open coil mattress to illustrate the company's claim that one's nighttime movements tend not to disturb sleeping pairs if their mattress is Beautyrest. The bowling ball demonstrations, popular with Simmons dealers, consumers, and industry experts, were revived in 2006.
In 2003, Fenway Partners made the chain of retail stores Sleep Country USA part of Simmons; In 2006 Simmons sold the chain to The Sleep Train of Citrus Heights, California. The following year, the company added memory foam products to its offer by acquiring memory and Comfor-Pedic combo lines from Comfor Products of Kent, Washington.
The company suffers financially under the successive holdings of several private equity firms and other private investors. Private equity owners took a $ 750 million profit from Simmons, while corporate debt increased from $ 164 million in 1991 to $ 1.3 billion in 2009. On September 25, 2009, Simmons announced restructuring plans of Chapter 11 and signed a purchase agreement with investors. a group led by Ares Management and Ontario Teacher Pension Plan. The bankruptcy court approved the deal, reducing the company's total debt from about $ 1 billion to $ 450 million. Bankruptcies exclude subsidiaries in Canada and Puerto Rico, but the units are included in an agreement with Ontario Teachers' Ares Management and Pension Plan. Ares and Pension Plan Ontario Teachers is also the owner of the Serta brand under National Bedding Company LLC. They operate Serta and Simmons Bedding as independent entities that continue to compete with each other.
On October 2, 2012, private equity firm Advent International acquired a majority stake in AOT Bedding Super Holdings (now Serta Simmons Holdings, LLC), parent company of Simmons and Serta. Ares Management and Pension Plan Ontario Teachers continues to have a "significant" share of the company's equity. At the time of the acquisition of Advent, Simmons and Serta together hold a 34 percent market share of US mattresses. Simmons and Serta maintain separate sales, marketing, research and development, and merchandising departments, and continue to remain separate.
Maps Simmons Bedding Company
References
External links
- Simmons website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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