Mattress market is anything but soft

Consumers who are planning to buy a mattress set should be prepared for sticker shock. A national shortage of foam, one of the key products in most mattresses, has forced a trickle-down impact, leading to bedding prices at the retail level rising by at least 20 percent, two Spokane manufacturers said.

A shortage of petrochemicals used to produce polyurethane foam, a product used in mattresses, hit bed-makers nationwide this fall. The major foam-producers blamed the shortage on the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Two Spokane bedmaking companies, Northwest Bedding and Twilight Bedding Co., both had to absorb 72 percent price hikes on their orders of foam, company representatives said.

To absorb that hit, both firms passed along price increases at the wholesale level of around 15 to 20 percent, the companies said.

That 15 percent hike will probably be passed onto consumers, and retailers may end up raising their bedding prices by as much as 20 percent, said Lee Kvalheim, controller and part-owner of Northwest Bedding.

The company has a production site on the West Plains and expects to see revenue of about $13 million this year.

“People can expect to see about a $200 hike on a full bed set,” Kvalheim said. “We had to pass our increases onto (retailers)” and they need to maintain their price margins, he said.

The same impact is felt on a smaller scale for upholstered furniture that uses foam, say industry experts

Supplies of foam have since come close to normal, but the price to furniture makers hasn’t come down.

Like Northwest Bedding, Twilight Bedding, at 12013 E. Trent, sells wholesale to retailers and directly from its store to individual customers. Both companies say they don’t expect to lose sales in 2006 despite the price hikes.

One reseller of Northwest Bedding mattresses hasn’t had to pass along the price hike yet. The Davenport Hotel in downtown Spokane has an inventory of 40 custom-made beds that sell for $799 to $999 per set, depending on size.

“We got those in May and still have many” of them, said Matt Jensen, director of sales and operations at the hotel. “They’re still at the same price because we got them before the price changes at Northwest Bedding.”

Kvalheim and Twilight Bedding owner Paul De Fazio learned in September that the two Gulf Coast hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, knocked offline some oil refineries producing chemicals used to produce furniture-grade foam.

The wholesale price of polyfoam had already risen 15 percent from a year earlier because of high oil prices, according to commodity analysts. The hurricanes worsened the supply chain, leading to the new hike, said Kvalheim.

But both De Fazio and Kvalheim distrust the cost calculations made by their foam suppliers.

Both say the increase in the cost of producing TDI, one of the ingredients needed to make foam, may have increased that much. But TDI doesn’t account for more than about 30 percent of polyfoam and shouldn’t have led to a net hike of more than 70 percent, the two agreed.

“It’s a bunch of junk,” said De Fazio. “They’re blaming Katrina and Rita for shutting down production, but I don’t think they can point to that much of an impact” (on their ability to produce foam), he added.