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One small company puts safety
first
9.30.03
By PETER B. LORD
The Providence Journal
It's a mattress advertisement like no other.
Instead of promoting comfort, sound sleep or an end to back
problems, the ad shows a big pack of matches and a headline that reads:
"This is how a firefighter sees your mattress."
Neal and Kathy Grigg and their Carolina Mattress Guild got the jump
on the rest of the country last spring by producing a line of
mattresses for the general public that are designed to resist fire.
A few months later, the North Carolina company launched what may be
an unprecedented advertising campaign that is designed to grab the
attention of retailers and make them care about mattress safety.
Anticipating government mandates for fire-safe mattresses sometime
in the next few years, the Griggs explain in their ad, "We chose to
embrace safety today rather than wait for a mandate because it is the
right thing to do."
And now one of the giants in the industry has announced plans to
join Carolina Mattress Guild in getting ahead of the mandate. Serta
Inc., the second-largest manufacturer of mattresses in the country, has
announced that it will begin this fall to produce flame-resistent
mattresses.
Neal Grigg readily concedes that his interest in the dangers of
mattresses was triggered in a spectacular and very expensive
demonstration: his factory burned down two years ago.
"When you have an insurance claim of $2.8 million, it gets your
attention," Grigg said in a recent interview. "Our company barely
survived that fire. Regardless of insurance, it never covers
everything."
Grigg said the fire shocked him with its speed and ferocity. And it more than convinced him of the dangers of polyurethane foam.
Carolina Mattress had just moved into its new manufacturing plant a
few miles outside of High Point, N.C., the so-called furniture capital
of the country.
It had just purchased a new quilting machine and built a new device
to feed it rolls of quilting. A maintenance man came in on a Saturday
morning to attach the device and chose to weld it rather than bolt it
to the machine.
Minutes later, when about 30 workers arrived to start the day's
production, hot metal from the welding apparently ignited a pile of
foam.
"When the girl who operated the machine picked the foam up, the air
got to it and it flashed," recalled Grigg. "It immediately just really
caught, real hot. From that roll it jumped to another roll. Inside of
less than a minute, this whole thing was a total blaze. It is amazing
how quick it can happen.
Grigg said he was in the back of the building when the fire broke
out and he ran to the front, yelling for people to get out. It was a
huge, open room with lots of exits, so everyone did get out safely. But
the fire was incredibly destructive.
"It went through the roof," Grigg said. "The roof was 28 feet high.
It was a new building. And there were sprinklers. But all they did was
slow the fire a bit.
"When you start listening to what firefighters tell you, the
mattresses literally explode. As a fire starts, the polyurethane
actually starts to melt. It drips down into the springs. Then all of a
sudden, there's enough for a major fire."
The fire attracted interest from companies that make flame resistent
materials. Grigg said he tested eight products and settled on material
produced by ElkCorp, a Texas-based company that makes roofing products.
"It's a woven Fiberglas material, like fabric. On top of that
fabric, they have a coating. It was kind of brittle and hard. So the
real key was to figure out how to get this into the mattress so it does
not affect the comfort. We put it in as part of our quilting process.
We've got it down far enough in there so that you can't feel it.
"We have foam on top of it. When flame gets to the barrier, the
coating melts, emiting a nontoxic gas that removes oxygen. No oxygen,
no fire. The whole object was to give the occupant of the bed some
escape time."
Their fire-safe mattresses have gotten rave reviews from fire safety experts.
North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Jim Long, who also serves as
the state Fire Marshal, praised the Carolina Mattress Guild as being a
good corporate citizen by adding to the "overall safety structure of
the home in which we live."
Don Bliss, president of the National Assocation of State Fire
Marshals, praised the company for being at "the forefront of commitment
to the safety of citizens."
But Grigg said he said he's not being overwhelmed with orders
because few retailers are aware of the fire dangers caused by most
mattresses.
"It's not catching on as quickly across the board as we'd like. The
reason is we have not been able to tell the story well enough to the
retailer," Griggs said. "The biggest problem is your retail sales
people don't know what they're talking about."
Right now, only stores in the mid-Atlantic states are carrying the
Safe Dreams mattresses. There is no way for individuals to special
order the mattresses because the company is geared for selling
truckloads of mattresses to retailers, not individual products.
Grigg has hired a new advertising firm and plans to spend more to expand his market share.
He's producing about 1,000 mattresses a day but only a small percentage are flame resistent.
"I believe in the next 3 or 4 years, it will be national.
"I'm excited. I think we've got a golden opportunity to really make
a major difference," Grigg said. "We got a doggone good product. We
think it looks good.
"I'm optimistic because we believe if we can get the story out a
little bit, and certain retailers will start using it as a first in the
area that does everything that it needs to do, why not take advantage
of it? We can be competitive. It looks good, smells good and it's safe."
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