Now Reading
Magniflex moves full speed ahead with new retailer program

Magniflex moves full speed ahead with new retailer program

Earlier this year, Magniflex made a major change by adding Ian Hays as the new vice president of sales for North America. With 23 years of experience on the retail side, Hays was tasked with an important goal: grow sales for the manufacturer as it moved a majority of its manufacturing to the U.S. 

With manufacturing previously in Italy, antidumping duties hit the company hard, and as all savvy companies do, it pivoted to ensure it could service customers with the same high-quality product it has been boasting for decades.  

Hays’ experience made him the ideal person to help the company expand its U.S. business 

“When I joined in July, my goal was threefold,” Hays tells Bedding News Now. “First, I navigated the company through a manufacturing shift as a function of the antidumping loss. This move tools Magniflex from manufacturing just outside of Florence, all the challenges associated with that. The other big task was meeting everyone in our dealer network, and it was very interesting hearing from our retail partners about what’s working well and what’s not.”

Ian Hays

Now, Magniflex is in a position to offer retailers an interesting and unique product that has a meaningful story behind it. Hays has been talking to retail partners about the opportunity Magniflex can offer them and how the company can help them transform their businesses.

“The cost of customer acquisition for mattresses today is somewhere around $370 — which is insane. For a retailer to maintain — as the rule of thumb — a 10% marketing spend on their business, they have to have an average ticket of $3,700. That’s a tall order for a lot of dealers, so the question I’m asking is how Magniflex can strengthen its position in the U.S. market and understand who it is as well as the place that it resides in within the broader retail strategy of brick-and-mortar retailers. 

Hays says the company is ready to move ahead at full speed, and High Point was a clear sign of that. Magniflex is flush with inventory, and the colossal manufacturing shift is nearly complete.  

“It was a huge logistical challenge, but it’s 99% behind us at this point,” Hays explains. “We have inventory in a warehouse and new factories that we can pull out of. We’re well hedged and incredibly stable in the U.S. The other big piece was the redefinition of our dealer program, and that is something that I soup to nuts redesigned over the course of that six-month time frame. Looking at things from a retailer’s perspective — because I was one for so long — we’re finding out how Magniflex can offer the strongest and most friendly retail strategy.

Now, Hays says the company has a retailer program that’s become a profit center with sheltered opportunities for retailers to create distinctiveness in the marketplace and “not just be another place where you can buy an S brand.”

“From my perspective, we don’t want an oversaturated marketplace,” he explains. “That undermines what Magniflex represents, which is an aspirational luxury product that’s not readily available everywhere.”

See Also

He also went into detail about what these programs entail — from industry-leading margins for retailers that are defensible in terms of the value proposition of the product. 

“In other words, we limit our market distribution so that retailers can know and feel confident that the margins and profit perspectives that are being shared with them as part of the program are the ones that they’ll actually realize,” Hays says. “We’re not looking for a million dealers all over the place. We want strong marketing co-op programs that encourage dealers to advertise in a targeted fashion, and have those advertising efforts be partially funded with the full support of a rather large marketing department that we have in Italy for any sort of creative asset design, participation or assistance.”

He also says Magniflex offers strong store training programs run by industry experts and that it’s not a company that will come in and tell a retailer how to do their job 

“Our dealer program provides a pathway to profitability,” he says. “We offer products that have unique patented technologies, so gives the retailer an opportunity to create distinctiveness in the shopping experience and their offerings. And we offer the support of a company that understands retail and is not scared to work cooperatively with retailers to develop targeted strategies for their market and really help them grow.”

View Comments (0)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Scroll To Top