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Case 1C: Mari's Maternity Mattress, Chilliwack B.C.
Launch date: September 2006
Target: First-year sales of 250 units
Diagnosis: Pump up marketing, sell at retail and go full-time—or sell the concept
In the family-oriented city of Chilliwack, B.C., 100 km east of Vancouver, Brian Stoner could be the best husband in town. When his wife, Mari Okazaki, was pregnant with their first child in 2001 and having trouble sleeping, he made her more comfortable by cutting a hole in a slab of four-inch-thick polyurethane foam—allowing Mari to sleep on her front or lie down while he gave her a pain-relieving back massage. "I just wanted to make sure she was as comfortable as she could be," says Stoner. The first time Mari slept on the mattress, "She fell asleep and didn't move for the whole night," he says. "When she spent the next four months sleeping on it, I thought this was a million-dollar business idea."
Wisely, the couple didn't rush into business. "I was listening to the small voice inside my head saying, 'It's not going to work out, you're going to lose money'," says Stoner. But friends, family and even Mari's obstetrician urged them to commercialize the product. With Stoner's mechanical aptitude as a trained plumber, and the confidence that came from running his parents' screen-printing business for several years, he kept tinkering with the product and the dream of starting a business. Five years, two more children and many prototypes later, Okazaki and Stoner launched Mari's Maternity Mattress (MMM) last September. Then they sat back to watch the orders pour in.
They're still waiting. As of mid-March, after nearly six months in business, MMM had sold only seven mattress sets, at about $229 apiece.
"I guess I was just naïve, expecting to get inquiries as soon as we put up the website [www.maternitymattress.ca]," says Stoner. "That's not what happened. We realize now that people have to see it, try it and understand it before they'll buy it."
Stoner and Okazaki aren't the first entrepreneurs to found a business on the Field of Dreams premise, "If you build it, they will come." But their attempt to commercialize their invention provides a classic case study of the perils of building a company around a single product. And it lends credence to the cynical calculation that having a rock-solid idea for a business is only 10% of the battle; everything else is execution.
The pair has done many things right. Stoner refined the idea through two more pregnancies, settling on a combination of two foam sheets about 80 inches long and four inches thick. After much trial and error, he learned to cut smooth, conical holes with a reciprocating saw—one for the stomach, two for the breasts. When a pregnant woman has trouble sleeping, she can start using the first mattress, with three holes custom-cut to fit her measurements. In her sixth month or so, when her stomach protrudes beyond the four-inch depth, she can add the second mattress, with a single hole, which holds her stomach, says Okazaki, like a gentle hand. Both mattresses slip inside a washable cotton cover that holds them together and provides additional support for dangly body parts. You even receive the leftover, cut-out circles when you order a Mari's Maternity Mattress. Once the baby is born, says Stoner, you can put the cut-outs back into the mattress and use it as a guest bed.
Before launching their home-based business, Stoner and Okazaki visited spas and massage centres up and down the Fraser Valley, offering to lend them mattresses for trial use. They bet that once a pregnant woman laid down on their maternity mattress, she would feel so comfortable that she'd immediately want to buy one. Okazaki confirms that she saw many prospects, who were tired of lying on their side with a random pile of pillows, fall in love with her mattress. While she has collected some passionate testimonials for the website, so far no pregnant woman has ordered anything. The first seven sales were all to massage therapists.
Luckily, the pair have minimized expenses and budgeted conservatively. Stoner keeps the foam in a 15-foot-square space in the basement of their home, where he also cuts the foam to measure. Nearby is Okazaki's sewing room, where she cuts and sews the burgundy-coloured mattress covers. (The covers take longer to make than the mattresses, says Stoner, so when business picks up they hope to outsource cover production.) Aside from buying enough foam to make about 30 mattress sets, they have invested mainly in a commercial photographer and an experienced writer to prepare their website, as well as search-engine optimization techniques that ensure their site comes up in the top two or three results when a Web surfer searches for "maternity mattress."
Okazaki, a former gymnastics teacher who runs the office while Stoner oversees manufacturing, signed up for the federally funded Self-Employment Program, which offers local business training and pays qualifying business owners about $300 a week for 40 weeks. Besides the financial advantage, Okazaki says she learned bookkeeping and marketing skills.
The couple's business plan states that if they target couples earning more than $40,000 a year and grab just a small fraction of the market, they could sell 7,167 units a year in Canada, and as many as 140,000 in the U.S. Wisely, they forecast first-year sales far below their projections for the future: just 250 units, for revenue of $57,000.
At the current pace, they might sell 25. They sold nothing in September or October, two mattresses in November and none in December. Sales have picked up a bit since, but not to the prime target: pregnant women. That came as a surprise, since pre-launch market research indicated that 33% of the 63 prospects they talked to would buy the product. "It's been tougher than I expected," says Stoner. "We need to educate the person at the same time as we do the sale."
In December, the pair hired a telemarketer, Jennifer Dew of We Dew Calls in Mission, B.C., to cold-call commercial prospects to arrange appointments for sales calls. They got a few inquiries, but most people were busy during the Christmas season, so the pair intends to engage her again.
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