Global Fabric Maker Adds Consultative Selling and Wide Product

Line to Enhance Competitive Edge

When the clock strikes midnight on July 1, 2007, the mattress industry will enter the era of mandated fire resistant standards imposed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in December of 2006. New sleep sets, manufactured after July 1, 2007, will have to comply with the fire code regulations.

From the early days of the regulating process, FR suppliers have been engaged in an a race to open as many doors as possible and to get those important first round sales. The ultimate objective, of course, is to establish what they hope will be long term relationships.

Mattress safety is a unique business. Before the state of California passed the nation’s first regulations, the market didn’t exist. But as it is in any business, there is a certain insight that can only be gained through experience, and experience takes time. For this reason, the first round selections may not necessarily be the suppliers of choice in the long run.

One of the things that will play a role in the selection process is the need for FR materials diversity. By their very nature, mattress designs are the sum total of their component materials. Many FR fabric suppliers are limited by the extent to which they can deal with so many designs, thereby placing manufacturers in the position of possibly having to alter their physical characteristics in order to comply with the CPSC requirements.

Some suppliers actually encourage this attitude by trying to get manufacturers to accept only what they can make. This limitation is especially challenging to smaller mattress manufacturers who worry about the possibility of having to drop some of their lines.

Since everybody’s requirements are different, one product will not work for each and every application. The product may solve the FR compliance challenge, but if it doesn’t meet the mattress maker’s aesthetic design qualities, then the solution is flawed. This was the reason that so many mattress manufacturers, when the regulations were proposed, were concerned about their impact.

While many FR suppliers have been frustrated by the need to meet so many diverse requirements, Freudenberg North America has actually made a virtue out of an obstacle. The giant global manufacturer of engineered fabrics has spent a lot of time learning about the customer base and trying to figure out everyone’s FR material needs on an individual basis.

Freudenberg uses what its representatives refer to as a process of consultative selling to help customers and potential customers not only survive the rigor of government regulations, but also to assure that all of their mattresses will get to market with the same feel and appearance they had before FR materials were added.

According to Market Manager Ashutosh Karnik, the Freudenberg approach is very much an individual consideration. "We take the approach that every manufacturer has a specific set of requirements that are unique to them. It’s like everyone has a unique set of DNA, and we have to uncover it."

To deal with this multiplicity of requirements, Freudenberg has paid very careful attention to the final result, studying retail performance and working backward to come up with a more effective solution. The result was a highly diversified line of FR materials known as Celestia, which specifically addressed mattress material requirements on an individual basis.

Basic Celestia, which was the very first series of materials to market, offered multiple material designs with physical characteristics ranging from thin and light to thick and heavy with multiple gradations in between. The line was made available for side panels, borders, filler cloth and top layer applications. It could be used on all types of innerspring mattresses. But while Basic Celestia attracted immediate attention because it could be used on a wide range of mattress designs, the fact remained that it was still a separate fabric added to the existing mattress.

Freudenberg’s technical staff went back to the drawing board and undertook the challenging process of devising a material that would serve both purposes, i.e. maintain the integrity of the mattress while providing the necessary FR protection. Six months later, Celestia Plus was introduced. To date, there is no other product on the market that has been able to meet this requirement. Celestia Plus literally became an all in one solution to the FR issue that wiped away the problem associated with the use of dual layers.

The next critical issue was memory foam mattress designs that had unique physical requirements due to their unique performance characteristics. The thing that makes memory foam mattresses unique is their ability to respond to the most minute movements of the sleeper. Since FR materials for this type of mattress require what amounts to an outer shell that fully encases the form of the mattress, another surface has to be added which will react to body movement in the inherent manner of memory foam mattresses. To meet this requirement, Freudenberg engineers developed an entirely new material that is stretchable in all directions with the same resiliency characteristics as the typical foam mattress.

"Safety has always been a big seller with the public," Karnik points out. "It’s all a matter of how you present it to people. We’re doing our best to keep you safe". This is what the story is all about. The Freudenberg Marketing Group is working on a number of ideas which it will present to its manufacturing customer base in the next quarter.

According to Ashutosh Karnik, the issue hasn’t been around long enough for anyone to figure out a way to use it as a competitive edge. "The industry as a whole could really capitalize on the benefits of safety conscious behavior if they were publicized. Before these regulations went into effect, it was assumed that such protection did not exist. Now we have a chance to set the record straight."