About Sleep Outfitters, USA

Kim Brown Knopf opened her first mattress store, Mattress Warehouse, in South Charleston, West Virginia, in 1983. She was 23 years old. After two decades of growth, she expanded the business into her native Kentucky, where she discovered the name Mattress Warehouse was already owned by another company. Sleep Outfitters USA was born, and today, the Lexington-based company employs more than 300 people across 100 stores in six states. The company operates under three names: Sleep Outfitters, Mattress Warehouse, and Mattress King, and they sell America’s most iconic bedding brands: Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, and Stearns & Foster.

Despite their growth, the Sleep Outfitters home-brewed webstore had started to hold the company back. So in 2016, they embarked on a total digital transformation. They wanted to boost web traffic (organic vs. paid), increase eCommerce traffic and sales, and improve customer experience (measured via chat). “We performed a comparative analysis between Shopify, Magento, and our in-house platform, and we felt that Magento was a superior platform. In addition, Magento allowed for significantly enhanced features and functionality,” said Kristin Micalizio, CMO of Sleep Outfitters.

“We Are Early In Our Journey, But We Feel Like The Magento Platform Coupled With Kensium’s Expertise Positions Us For Explosive Growth.”

 – Kristin Micalizio, CMO, Sleep Outfitters.

The Webstore Of Their Dreams

Together with their partner, Kensium, the Sleep Outfitters team migrated Sleepoutfitters.com from their old platform to Magento Commerce 2. The timeline was seven months, which included six weeks of gathering requirements, four months in development, and a month of testing and preparation. Using Magento, Sleep Outfitters integrated a store locator extension, product feed, quick view, blog, geolocation, multi-warehouse inventory, and advanced order details to create a dynamic webstore with a streamlined sales process in the backend and the front end.

“We believe our web platform is industry-leading for omnichannel sleep shop retailers, and we are only in the infancy of launch,” said Micalizio. They built a comparison tool that allows users to select various mattresses, then compare them side-by-side for color, feel, and sleep position. In addition, they get up-sold accessories for bedding sets and can even choose their own delivery date – which is rare in the mattress industry.

Extraordinary Growth

The new Sleep Outfitters site launched on January 7, 2019. The whole migration was smooth, with zero downtime and impressive results from day one of the launch: “Our eCommerce sales are up, our conversion rate is up significantly, as is AOV,” said Micalizio. “Organic search traffic normally declines on launch, but ours has increased 56 percent in the first month.” Most importantly, Sleep Outfitters customers were impressed with the site. “My online shopping experience went very smoothly,” one reviewer wrote, “I had an easy time finding exactly what I wanted, and checkout was a breeze.”

Six weeks after their launch, Sleep Outfitters crunched some impressive numbers: Their online sales had risen by 283 percent in January. In addition, organic web traffic has increased by 56 percent year-over-year. “We’ve seen a significant reduction in chats regarding general web navigation and checkout,” said Micalizio, a true sign of an intuitive user experience. So successful was the Sleep Outfitters’ digital transformation that the company plans to migrate to Magento Commerce and their other brands, mattresswarehouse.com and mattressking.net.

“We Believe Our Web Platform Is Industry-Leading For Omnichannel Sleep Shop Retailers.”

 – Kristin Micalizio, CMO, Sleep Outfitters.

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