Select Comfort

Already an extensive retail chain, with 330 bedding stores, Minneapolis retailer Select Comfort decided to expand its specialty bed and bedding empire even further by getting into mail order.

"Our existing retail customers are very loyal to our line of bedding systems, so we decided to add a catalog," says director of catalog marketing Leonor Lucero. Prices range from $12 for a back massager to $3,500 for a complete bedding system that includes mattress and box spring. Response from the initial June drop, to 500,000 names from the existing house file, exceeded expectations of a 1.5% response rate. The average order is also higher than anticipated.

The company, which hired San Francisco-based catalog agency Aesthetics Marketing to design the book, plans to add eight pages of new products to the catalog for the fall/holiday edition and to redesign its Website.