Pleasant Mattress Engages California Artist For Original Paintings
Furniture World News Desk on
9/12/2016
Home product manufacturers give a lot of consideration to the environment they create at retail to showcase their products in a way that will draw consumers to their brands. For Pleasant Mattress, a third-generation family-owned West Coast mattress manufacturer, its approach has been more inspired than most: The company commissioned original paintings from artist Lauren Taylor Engel that relate to the company’s brand message, and it is providing prints to each of its retailers to show on the sales floor.
Taylor Engel, artist and owner of Lauren Taylor Creates, rendered three paintings, “Loft Kitchen,” “Loft Bedroom” and “Loft Living Room,” all in water color on water color paper. Each one captures a feeling of affluent sophistication expressed in a minimalist style of interior design in a palette of neutral tones.
“The lifestyle of the California customer served as my inspiration,” Taylor said. “It’s less about the mattress individually and more about the overall environment of the luxury home, where every piece in the home is of the highest quality – including the mattress.”
The company and the artist first crossed paths when Taylor handled a personal commission for Jennie Schuh, marketing and creative manager for Pleasant Mattress.
“When we decided to try something unique at retail, we eventually landed on the idea of original art,” Schuh said. “Lauren’s style and her background in expressing all aspects of ‘fashion’ in her work, made her a perfect match for the project.”
As President and CEO Rion Morgenstern sees it, the paintings are as much an example of what customers aspire as to as they are a point-of-sale merchandising tool.
“The luxury customer usually has original art hanging on their walls, so it’s an aspect of interior decoration that they relate to,” he said. “For the customer who aspires to the highest quality furniture and materials, Lauren’s paintings serve as an illustration of what a customer might dream their bedroom will look like one day, with a luxury mattress as the foundation for the room.”
The collaborators chose a luxury loft apartment as the subject, and Taylor said that made her think of, “a big city and big windows,” which appear in each painting. The original watercolors were scanned and transformed into 24-by-36-inch wrapped canvas prints, which are intended for retailers to hang as a triptych, three associated paintings displayed together.
“The response has been more than we could have expected,” Morgenstern said. “One retailer loves them so much that he has dusted off his own easel and is once again painting so he can add to feeling that the artwork has created in his store.”
More about Pleasant Mattress: Pleasant Mattress is an independent, family-owned mattress supplier in the Western United States. The company employs 130 people and has been in business since 1959 when it was founded as the Pleasant Bag Co. The company is a licensee and manufacturer of the Spring Air and Chattam & Wells brands. The company produces traditional mattresses, specialty sleep products and futons in its 150,000-square-foot facility in Fresno, Calif. For additional information visit
www.CannonSleep.com.