Local bedding company producing sweet dreams for W.Va. resort guests

HUNTINGTON -- A mix of traditional and cutting-edge practices is helping to bolster a local bedding company.

Imperial Bedding Co., located in Huntington, is producing mattresses loaded with its new eight-inch coils. The industry standard for mattresses is six-inch coils.

The company also manufactures its own coils, while most others utilize coils bought from other companies, Ronnie Rowe, chief executive office of the company, said.

Imperial purchased the equipment to manufacture the coils in early 2006. After months of testing and fine tuning, the operation swung into high gear and the company has now shipped nearly 10,000 of its new products, Rowe said.

"The real difference is our taller tempered coils," Paul Ristow, of the marketing department, said.

Imperial Bedding still produces two-sided mattresses, while the majority of the industry has switched to one-sided. It handles all the quilting for the fabric in an individual, handmade fashion.

"We're still old school," Rowe said. "We give you supreme bedding because we have better products and better techniques."

The company, which has about 90 employees locally, distributes to over 400 retailers in West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee. When it comes to shipping, it has the only automated loading system for mattresses and box springs in the world.

They recently landed a contract for West Virginia's resorts, hospitals and lodges.

"Basically, if the state of West Virginia needs a bed, they come to Imperial Bedding Company," Rowe said.

The company's center of operations is at 11th Street and 7th Avenue, but its showroom is on 8th Avenue and 1st Street. The equipment that produces the new taller-coiled mattresses is also located in the rear of the latter facility.

"We didn't have anywhere else to locate it," Rowe said. "The machines that produce mattresses at the 7th Avenue factory pull the mattresses along a path as long as a city block."

The showroom factory produces the tempered coils, wraps them in fabric, glues them together and packages them in wire frames to be shipped to the 7th Avenue factory, where they'll be covered in fabric and shipped to customers, Rowe said.

Imperial Bedding has roots in Huntington as far back as the 1920s, when James Fred Edwards, husband of Joan C. Edwards, started the National Mattress Co.

The Edwardses have since become two of Marshall University's largest benefactors. During the 1940s, while the company was run by Jim Man, Evelyn Cochran, Rowe's mother was the general manager, Rowe said.

In 1969, Cochran and Rowe left National Mattress to start Imperial Bedding, which will celebrate its 39th anniversary in October.