An Excellent Daybed Adventure

I discovered daybeds by accident. My original retail store was a waterbed store, back in the early 1980's. Waterbeds went through a huge spike in popularity back then and stores were popping up in every tiny town. Amazingly, waterbeds were just complex enough that regular old line furniture stores owned by grumpy old men, dismissed the waterbed fad as a fad.

Yes they were right, it turned out to be a five year fad. But it also got a lot of mattress and furniture guys started in the business. The smart waterbed store operators switched partially out of waterbeds and into other products as the fad died down. The grumpy old men could have cut the new competition off at the pass had they been able to better read the future.

Waterbed store owners really had two easy choices of fairly new sleep furniture products at that time. Futons were starting to be sold in off beat stores and again the grumpy old furniture men had no understanding of them and left this market to the waterbed guys and specialty futon guys.

Daybeds also started to become slightly popular at this time and several daybed frame manufacturers quickly came out with some very nice frames. The grumpy old men understood the daybed concept much better than waterbeds and futons so this market tended to be shared between the various types of futon, furniture and waterbed stores.

Daybeds were a stepping stone for many waterbed retailers, like myself. It turns out that the daybed requires a traditional twin size mattress. Waterbed stores had very little contact with innerspring mattress manufacturers until they had to buy twin mattresses for the daybeds. At some point in time, many waterbed store owners had an aha experience with innerspring mattresses.

Not only were they in demand, but they didn’t get holes poked in them by cats and stray earrings. The waterbed stores that did not make the jump to traditional innerspring mattresses and/or furniture, mostly died out. I’m happy to say that daybeds were a significant force in helping these retailers make the transition. Happily, I am a retailer that got lucky and branched into daybeds, futons, tables and chairs, sofas and even hot tubs and spas at the time.