How 1-800-Mattress Turned zzzz's into $$$$!

“Dial 1-800-MATTRESS and leave off the last S for savings” has become an ad slogan that is familiar to virtually every New Yorker, especially those that had to make a hasty move. 64-year old Napoleon Barragan, the Ecuadorian-born former high school teacher behind the $100 million dollar mattress business, arrived in Queens from Bogota, Colombia with his wife Kay, in 1969. He spent the first few years in the United States working a variety of odd jobs, including one job as a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias, where, he remembers, “I would pray that they wouldn’t open the door, and if they did, that they knew how to speak Spanish.” Six years after moving to the states, Barragan opened up a small furniture store on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. One day, when he was riding the subway in Manhattan, Barragan noticed an ad for a “Dial-A-Steak” restaurant, and a light went off in his head: if there are people around the city buying a T-bone on the phone, could the same can be done with mattresses?

Founder "Napoleon Barragan"

Working out of the basement of his store with one or two employees and just two phone lines, Barragan turned his mattress-by-phone concept into what is now a multimillion-dollar organization and the nation’s leading bedding telemarketing company. With 325 employees and annual sales topping $100 million, 1-800-Mattress also has 47 showrooms around the country, and 250 distributors around the U.S.   And let’s not forget mattress.com.  Recently, Report Editor Robert Levin sat down with Napolean and his son Luis, the president and COO of the company, in his hectic office to talk about how rewarding  and challenging the sleep business can really be.