Mattress manufacturing

A mattress is mostly air, which is why it is still made near where it is sold: freight protects a regional factory from an offshore one better than any tariff, and a plant is sewing, foam and a quilting line rather than heavy capital. Two-thirds of the 250 Canadian establishments in this group have fewer than ten people. The cut is that the category has stopped growing while the leader bought both the shop floor and the spring. Canadian revenue for the whole group was $1.10B in 2013, $1.20B in 2019 and $1.15B in 2024 [A] — eleven years of flat nominal dollars, which is a real decline once prices are taken out. Mattresses are about $0.8B of that and blinds and shades about $0.35B, neither of them growing since 2013. In a category that is not growing a new factory sells only what it takes from someone else — and in eighteen months the someone else closed on every side of it. Somnigroup, the Tempur Sealy parent, bought Mattress Firm in February 2025 and reported $7,476.5M of 2025 net sales, of which Mattress Firm’s stores were $3,505.4M, lifting its direct share of sales to 65.2% by the fourth quarter [A]. On 26 August 2026 it also bought Leggett & Platt [A], the components maker whose springs and foam a new plant would buy. And Sleep Number, the largest listed vertically integrated bed maker, filed for chapter 11 on 12 June 2026 and was sold to Sleep Country Canada on 31 July 2026 for US$529.5M, with nothing expected for its shareholders [A] — so the Canadian chain that already controlled the shelf now owns the American factory too. An entrant would buy its inputs from one competitor and ask another for shelf space. What remains is factory-direct retail — a store problem, not a manufacturing one — or boxed beds sold online against imported foam. Blinds and shades, the other half of this residual code, were not examined beyond their revenue line.