San Francisco’s Legacy Mattress Maker Uses Agile Development to Create a New Product Collection
San Francisco, CA: Surrounded by digital giants like Google, Facebook and Apple, the McRoskey San Francisco is a bit of an anachronism. In their San Francisco factory, tools are purpose-built, equipment dating back decades is treated as an extension of workers’ hands. Very few processes are automated. This is not the place you would expect to find a common software development process – Agile Product Development – adapted to consumer goods, but that is precisely what the company has done to develop their new Platform Tufted mattress collection.
“We wanted to make a mattress specifically for platform beds, providing the quality of sleep customers expect from McRoskey. We decided to take a page from our Silicon Valley neighbors and applied the Agile process to how we developed our new mattress collection. Each week, we built several mattresses that were tested by employees and customers whose feedback allowed us to almost instantaneously improve the product,” said Vanessa Contreas, VP of manufacturing for McRoskey. “Because we own our factory and can tweak every component of the manufacturing process, we were able to iterate and optimize our new product offering with real-time feedback from hundreds of end users.”
The new Platform mattress collection stays true to McRoskey’s traditional craftsmanship and quality standards; threaded coils are layered with filling materials – natural rubber latex and fiber filling, in this case – and then encased in all-cotton ticking and tufted. The simplified construction techniques developed during the Agile Product Development process enabled the company to offer this new mattress at a significantly lower price than their more premium offerings.
“Recently, the mattress industry has been razor focused on convenient product delivery, taking its eyes off customers’ needs – sleep that restores and refreshes. We chose the Agile Development Process, because it maximized customer involvement in new product development,” said Robin McRoskey Azevedo, CEO and 3th generation owner of the company. “Ongoing relationships with our customers is the DNA of our company, so the Agile process was a perfect fit for us.”
The new McRoskey Platform bed is available to try at McRoskey’s San Francisco and Palo Alto showrooms and available for purchase online.
About McRoskey
Founded in San Francisco in 1899, McRoskey San Francisco makes luxury beds. With a dedication to comfort and quality, every McRoskey mattress is crafted using time-tested materials and construction techniques passed down through five generations of family members. The company has four bed collections – NATURAL Tufted, CLASSIC Tufted, BASIC Tufted, and (new) PLATFORMTufted – which are built to order and can be custom-sized. McRoskey San Francisco also offers premium down pillows, luxurious blankets, duvets, linens, featherbeds, mattress toppers, and mattress protectors. McRoskey.com