Paul Folino is pitching mattresses.
Folino, head of Costa Mesa-based Emulex Corp., is featured in a new and somewhat amusing light,in print ads for Anaheim-based Custom Comfort Mattress.
He’s pictured in a white shirt, maroon tie and slacks, leisurely laying on a Custom Comfort bed.
The mattress maker has another unlikely pitchman,Jim Doti, president of Chapman University in Orange. Doti is shown in front of Chapman’s Memorial Hall holding a coffee cup by a stark white bed.
The ads, to be splashed around OC, are the 22-year-old mattress maker’s way of boosting its image as a luxury bed maker, said Custom Comfort co-owner Mel Trudell.
The company’s handcrafted mattresses sell for upward of $4,000.
“Our ad really wasn’t saying who we were,” said Trudell, who owns the company with brother Gary Trudell.
Custom Comfort’s old ads were wordy and played up the company as the small guy taking on big mattress makers.
“They had the quality but they didn’t have the image,” said Rebecca Hall, president of Costa Mesa’s Idea Hall, which developed the ads. “We want to sell the upper-end bed.”
Hall also is responsible for getting Folino and Doti.
She’s a Chapman graduate and former vice president of the school’s alumni association. Hall contacted Doti, who said he’d do it if Folino did, she said.
Folino, who sits on Chapman’s board of trustees, said he’d do it if it would help the university and if he could plug the Orange County Performing Arts center, where he recently served as chairman.
Folino and Doti weren’t paid for the ads. But they got their plugs in. Doti’s ad prominently features a Chapman building. In Folino’s, he’s eating from a popcorn bucket from Chapman’s film school. The text includes a mention of Emulex and the performing arts center.
Custom Comfort’s Trudell said he is aiming to push the company’s 60,000-square-foot Anaheim factory to capacity,600 beds a day, up from 200 beds a day. Custom Comfort sells its beds in its own stores, five in all, including a Newport Beach store expected to open in October.
The goal is to open 10 more in Southern California in the next five or six years, Trudell said.
The company, which employs 94 people including 42 factory workers, is one of the few that still makes beds with buttons.
Trudell refers to the button machine as “his baby.” The machine is the same one he used when he first started making beds. The buttons pin down the top layer of fabric to keep the cotton underneath from bunching up. Most beds today use stitching because it’s cheaper.
The company also plays up its box springs with coiled springs, instead of the foundations used by other mattress makers, and a steel mesh lining over the coils of the mattress.
Trudell started the company in Santa Ana in 1983 with his now-retired brother Marty Trudell as a way out of poverty, he said. Trudell is one of 10 kids, the fourth from the top. He grew up used to sharing sleeping quarters, small spaces and hand-me-downs.
As a kid, he started working at a mattress factory in Fullerton, where he was born and raised. Then he and his brother started their own business in the garage. Later, the company moved to Mission Viejo and then to Anaheim, where the company’s been for nearly three years.
Many who work in the factory are longtime employees. The factory manager has been with the company since he was 15.
Making beds in California is costly. About two years ago, the company considered a move to Arizona, Trudell said. In January, a state regulation went into effect that requires mattress makers to put a fire barrier in every mattress.
The mattress has to hold a flame at 200 degrees for six minutes. Trudell said the law upped costs by 8%.
Custom Comfort is better able to control costs because it owns its building, Trudell said. The factory also has been able to lower its workers’ compensation insurance costs by being safety conscious, he said.
