Season
Year-round, with holiday weekend promotions driving the biggest delivery weeks.
Commodity playbook
Who ships mattresses
| Shipper | Town | County |
|---|---|---|
| Tempur Sealy International | Lexington, KY | Fayette |
| Tempur Sealy International | Crawfordsville, IN | Montgomery |
| Serta Simmons Bedding | Doraville, GA | DeKalb |
| Ashley Furniture | Arcadia, WI | Trempealeau |
| Get the full list with contacts in your inbox → breadd.ai | ||
Head offices and named plants. Tempur Sealy alone operates 33 North American facilities, so the plant serving your lane is rarely the head office.
Ask for the plant's transportation manager. The compressed bed-in-a-box business changed this category: rolled and boxed mattresses ship like ordinary parcels and palletized freight, while traditional innerspring units are bulky and easily soiled. Ask which they are shipping, because the two are barely the same commodity from a trailer's point of view.
Where it hauls
Regional, deliberately. Because a trailer of mattresses cubes out at a fraction of legal weight, manufacturers place plants close to their markets rather than centralising: one maker alone runs 33 North American facilities, from Kentucky and Indiana through Virginia and New Mexico. Freight runs plant to regional distribution centre to retail, with a growing direct-to-consumer stream in compressed boxes. The makers to know:
How to open
"Are you setting capacity ahead of the spring promotions? I run high cube and I know these have to arrive clean."
To the plants, February into MarchCleanliness is the specific issue. A mattress that arrives marked is a total loss on a high-value unit, and a carrier who raises trailer condition before rate is not the usual call.
Qualifying questions
- Boxed or traditional? Compressed bed-in-a-box units palletize and stack like ordinary freight. Traditional innerspring mattresses are bulky, awkward and easily marked. Establish which, because they load nothing alike.
- What does it cube versus weigh? A full trailer of mattresses can be a fraction of legal weight. Count units, not tons. The constraint is always volume.
- Is the trailer clean? This is the whole claim risk. A mattress that arrives with a mark on it is scrap, and the value per unit is high. Confirm trailer condition expectations and be honest about your equipment.
- Distribution centre or direct to store? Distribution centre is dock to dock. Store delivery means multiple stops and often no dock. Home delivery is a separate last-mile business entirely. Ask which.
- Is this a promotional week? Retail bedding runs on holiday weekend promotions and the delivery build before them is the tightest capacity of the year. Knowing which week you are quoting into changes everything.
When to call
February and March, ahead of the spring promotional season. The category runs all year but the biggest delivery weeks cluster around the holiday weekends that retailers build promotions on, from Presidents Day through Memorial Day and Labor Day. Those weeks are when capacity gets tight.
Sources
- International Sleep Products Association mattress industry trends: a total US mattress market of 39.7 million units valued at $9.8 billion in 2023, with 2025 unit shipments down 13.2% and market value down 6.5%. Tempur Sealy operating 33 North American facilities plus 38 international plants, including a $138 million foam pouring facility at Crawfordsville, Indiana and operations at Duffield, Virginia and Albuquerque, New Mexico. sleepproducts.org
- The February to March call window and the holiday-weekend promotional pattern. Reasoned from retail bedding practice rather than a manufacturer's stated schedule.