The Frankfurt mattress company Emma has grown from a small start-up to the most successful sleep brand in Europe. Now she breaks the sound barrier of one billion euros in annual sales. And the founders have even bigger plans.
If you google how to get rich while you sleep, you’ll come across the wildest advice. that it is possible with Dennis Schmoltzi, on the other hand, can confirm that he earns a lot of money while sleeping. Ten years ago, the 36-year-old founded the Bettzeit company together with Manuel Müller. In 2015, the Emma mattress was created under the umbrella of the start-up.
Since then, the small mattress newcomer from Frankfurt has become a dominant player in the industry. Last year alone, Emma sold 2.3 million mattresses worldwide and increased sales from 645 million euros to 873 million euros. The Emma makers have set themselves the next sound barrier for 2023: “We want to break the one billion euro turnover this year. And we are well on the way to doing that,” says co-boss Schmoltzi in an interview with the star.
Emma mattress: from zero to a billion
One billion euros in sales per year. With a mattress brand that didn’t even exist ten years ago. It is a remarkable success story that Emma wrote there. Because others have tried to break into the mattress industry in the same way, and some have failed miserably. A few years ago, around the same time as Emma, foreign online providers such as Casper or Eve also entered the German market, which had previously been characterized by stationary chain stores. While the traditional mattress dealers tormented their customers with a non-transparent offer whose constantly changing models were hardly comparable, the online challengers used a lot of marketing to advertise a single mattress that was supposed to fit everyone and could be ordered at the click of a mouse.
But the German campaign of the US giant Casper, in which even the Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire had invested money, failed despite many millions of investors. Equally unfortunate was the German expansion of the British supplier Eve, which withdrew from the local market after a devastating verdict by Stiftung Warentest. Instead, the Emma mattress is now conquering the world from Germany.
Emma is now sold in 30 countries. The approximately 1,000 employees are based not only in the Frankfurt headquarters, but also in offices in Lisbon, Mexico, Manila and Shanghai. “When we started, our goal was to create the largest online shop for mattresses in Germany,” says Schmoltzi, who was a management consultant at McKinsey before the Emma adventure. “Today we are the largest sleep brand in Europe. Our aim is to become one of the leading, if not the leading, sleep brand in the world.” Schmoltzi sees the listed US group Tempur Sealy as a benchmark, which has annual sales of around five billion euros worldwide.
The power of Stiftung Warentest
Emma is not listed. The founders built the business on their own and, according to their own statements, have been profitable for five years. It was not until 2020 that Schmoltzi and Müller sold 50.1 percent of Emma to the Haniel family conglomerate. The two founders each still hold almost a quarter of the shares and continue to manage the company. Sales are still mainly online, even if Emma is now also available in German shops.
The biggest mattress competitor in Germany is also an underdog who made it from nothing. Among the online providers in Germany, the Berlin company Bett1 initially had the edge with its “Bodyguard” model. The Bodyguard mattress has been awarded the best mattress several times by Stiftung Warentest, making it a bestseller.
Most recently, however, Emma was also able to assert itself in several comparative tests. In 2019, the Emma foam mattress won the first test, in 2021 the product testers also hoisted the spring core mattress from Emma to the throne and just a few weeks ago the reversible Emma Duo Flip. “The fact that Stiftung Warentest gave us an award definitely gave us a boost in growth in Germany,” says Schmoltzi. He is happy about every further award, but emphasizes at the same time: “At the level at which we are now, our success as a company no longer depends on it.”
Global expansion and local preferences
Although Germany is still Emma’s largest sales market, with sales in the hundreds of millions, it is no longer the only important one. Great Britain and France are also important in Europe. Emma has the largest percentage growth in North and South America and Asia. Emma faces the challenge of offering a product that is as uniform as possible on the one hand, but also meeting the country-specific preferences on the other. “Depending on the country, there are different customer preferences,” says Schmoltzi.
In the USA, customers like marshmallow-soft mattresses, while in many Asian countries people want to lie firmer. And in Colombia it definitely has to be a reversible mattress, because that’s how it’s learned there. Emma solves the challenge by having the products produced locally for the respective markets as far as possible. Short transport routes from factory to customer are more cost-efficient anyway for a product as bulky as a mattress, says Schmoltzi. Emma also tries to organize operational management as decentrally as possible. Young employees should also be given a lot of responsibility on site.
Mattress maker Schmoltzi is also concerned with the issue of sustainability. The foam mattress that is prevalent in Germany, among other places, is basically made of crude oil and is also difficult to recycle, says Schmoltzi. That may not be the long-term solution. “It is important to us to reduce our ecological footprint,” says Schmoltzi. That’s why Emma is currently focusing heavily on mattresses with spring cores and is also looking for other alternatives. “I don’t know where we’ll be in ten years, but I think the trend away from petroleum-based foam mattresses is going away.”
Source: Stern
