It was more than half a century ago, but Jim Nation still remembers the conversation.
He was a young, impressionable bedding buyer for a Florida department store when his boss pulled him aside one day.
“He told me that I may be the only buyer in the store whose products are in everyone’s home,” Nation recalled the other day. “He told me, ‘Your job is to get them products that they can afford and that we can make margin on.’ That was a life lesson for me.”
He remembers working with his suppliers back in those days on a hard-hitting promotion: twin mattresses starting at $33. A major rival was offering twin bedding starting at $59 per piece. Nation’s promotion brought a flood of shoppers to his store, Richards Department Store in Miami.
“The big bedding brands miss that point today,” Nation said, now commenting on the current state of the mattress business. “The brands like to say that e-commerce retailers stole the low-end business. But they didn’t steal it — the big brands gave it to them.”
That early lesson about the importance of offering affordable mattresses to consumers at margins that benefit retailers is one that Nation has embraced over the years in his career, one that took him from the Florida mattress scene back in the 1970s to the national bedding landscape in the 1990s and early 2000s, when he was president and CEO of Spring Air. Later he worked at Serta and at Southerland before joining South Bay International in March 2025 as vice president of national accounts.
“Jim has an exceptional reputation in the industry,” South Bay CEO Toby Konetzny said when he hired Nation earlier this year.
In his decades in the bedding industry, Nation has seen several different business models employed by regional and national bedding producers, serving retailers of all sizes. South Bay’s approach, which features a vertically integrated manufacturing operation and quick shipments to consumers or retailers, stands out, he says.
“I think the South Bay model is the future in the bedding business,” Nation asserts. “Retailers who have 35 to 40 beds on their sales floor and carry several national brands, how much inventory can they carry? With South Bay, retailers don’t need to carry a big inventory of beds. We can ship to consumers or retailers probably faster than consumers could get the products from another manufacturer.”
South Bay, which has long served e-commerce retailers, can ship its bedding lines to retailers in metro markets in two to three days, much quicker than the eight- to 10-day shipping times offered by some bedding producers these days, Nation says.
And those bedding lines offer better margins than many other bedding lines, giving the retailers a greater return on their investment with South Bay, he adds.
South Bay’s value-packed lines, which retail from $499 to $1,999 for a queen mattress, reflect the affordable, margin-packed bedding that his old boss talked about five decades ago. The South Bay line also includes adjustable bases, pillows, bed frames, foundations, sheets, pillowcases and bedding protectors.
This week he’s returning to the High Point Market, which he’s visited regularly over his five decades in the industry.
“Main Street looks the same,” he said, “but some of the brands on the buildings are different.”
He attended High Point regularly back in his Spring Air days and later in his Serta days, and he knows the market is well attended by furniture retailers, one of the groups that South Bay is targeting for growth. “Furniture stores go to High Point,” he says, firmly.
He also notes that new products are always in the spotlight in High Point, and he adds that South Bay’s expanding product lines, which include a variety of proprietary designs, should be attractive to furniture stores who want to stand out in the highly competitive bedding marketplace.
Given his long tenure in the industry and his record of service to the International Sleep Products Association, where he was chairman of the board of directors, and the Better Sleep Council, Nation now stands as a senior statesman in the industry.
“The bedding industry does a lot of good things,” he observed. “It makes great products for the consumer that benefit their health and wellness. Our products are very good for the economic health of our retailers. And our mattress manufacturing infrastructure is healthy, probably more so than for any other home furnishings category.”
It’s an industry that has given Jim Nation a long, fruitful career — and he’s not done, yet. He’s inviting his many retail friends to visit South Bay’s High Point showroom at 510 Furniture Plaza, where he’s got some affordable, margin-packed mattress lines to tell them about.
