Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Tampa bedding maker is sold

Spring Air is buying Consolidated, others so it can oversee the manufacturing.

By Christina Rexrode, Times Staff Writer
Published June 28, 2007

A Chicago mattress brand is buying Tampa-based Consolidated Bedding Inc. and most of its other manufacturers, signaling a sea change in the way it does business.

Spring Air Co., the country's fourth-largest mattress brand, said Wednesday that it will take over Consolidated Bedding. The latter company, a bedding manufacturer, has 200 employees in Tampa and another 150 at four other plants across the country.

Terms were not disclosed.

Spring Air spokesman Stan Steinreich said the acquisition will have no immediate effect on Tampa workers, except that some local executives might transfer to Chicago.

He said eventually there might be "some operational redundancies that need to be addressed," without giving a timetable or other specifics.

Also on Wednesday, Spring Air announced its acquisition of six other licensees, scattered from Georgia to Washington state, which together have about 700 employees.

All told, Spring Air will explode from a 40-employee company in the Chicago suburbs to one with more than 1, 100 workers.

By buying its manufacturers, Spring Air is following an old game plan. Instead of just selling the rights to produce Spring Air mattresses to manufacturers, it will now oversee the manufacturing as well.

In the past couple of decades, Steinreich said, mattress giants Sealy and Simmons have undertaken similar arrangements. The idea, he said, is "to create one company with one vision" and to make production quality consistent among plants.

"Say I take an order in Tampa, and I've got to fill that in over 300 retail locations around the country," Steinreich said. "Without having the control over quality and service in each of these markets where the mattress would be produced, it had created a challenge for the retailer."

The chairman and CEO of Consolidated Bedding, Steve Antinori, will become the non-executive chairman of Spring Air.

The company is not releasing financial details of the acquisitions. Steinreich said that the Spring Air brand does about $400-million in business each year.

[Last modified June 27, 2007, 23:02:20]