Spurred on by a sleepless night and expat complaints about hard mattresses, Spencer Jan has forged a lucrative and expanding business in china

Spencer Jan has no trouble getting to sleep at night- though it didn't always used to be that way.

In fact the founder of SlumberMAAX, a Shanghai-based bedding provider, had many restless nights when he first began working in China.

"I rented a small apartment that was furnished by local Chinese landlords. The beds were hard," Jan says.

"It just didn't seem fair for expats to have to deal with landlord-provided mattresses."

It's not just a result of penny-pinching landlords that has led to an abundance of rock-hard beds in China. Going back as far as 121 AD, the Kang, a hard clay bed with a built-in heating area beneath, was once the pinnacle of the traditional Chinese household. They were often topped with pillows made of porcelain and jade.

In more modern times, the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine preach that having a harder bed provides various health benefits, particularly in helping with chronic back pain.

The result is that many beds found in China lean more toward tough than tender - much to the chagrin of expats who are used to softer sleeping conditions back home.

But while to many expats a hard bed is merely a reason to moan about the rigors of expat life, to Jan it was a dream come true.

Seeing the need to offer expats an alternative, Jan began selling memory foam mattresses - a dense polyurethane which reacts to body heat and molds to the sleeper's body - which were produced in China, but almost impossible to find in stores.

The American-born Chinese first started working in China in 2005 where he began his career at a media advertising company as part of a manager trainee program in Nanjing.

Shortly after, however, he shifted gears and moved to a small US-based sourcing company targeting Western markets with Chinese made goods. It was during his time at this company that Jan first encountered a solution to China's tough beds.

"One of the many projects we took on was memory foam beds. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of this product and visited many factories which helped me learn about the manufacturing process behind these mattresses," he says.

"As we started to export these mattress back to the US for our customer, I took the liberty of having a sample delivered to my apartment in Shanghai.

"Somehow, I think I got used to hard mattresses, but when I tried the memory foam mattress, it was amazing. I couldn't believe what I was missing. I guess the transition from poor college student to half-pat never gave me a chance to realize what a good quality bed felt like."

Impressed with the results, Jan began talking with fellow expats and quickly found that he was not the only person who faced the problem of stiff sleeping arrangements.

"The light turned on," he says.

The conversations with fellow expats led Jan to begin conducting research, though he only needed to ask around Shanghai to discover just how popular this idea would be.

Posing as a soon-to-be expat, he took to the web posting in forums to ask whether or not he should bring his own bed when traveling to China in order to get a reaction from netizens in Shanghai.

While his ruse was quickly uncovered by a sleuthing web-user, he had seen enough.

"I didn't think too much about it and only conducted a small amount of market research before I dove in," Jan says.

Contacting the factory directly and using knowledge of setting up websites, Jan soon invested his own money into buying his first batch. Within the first year of experiencing his sample mattress he had founded SlumberMAAX.

While initially the business was small - when Jan first started out he was only selling to a close-knit community of expats living in Shanghai, delivering each mattress personally to the person's door - as word got out about his business sales figures blossomed.

Since then, his business has spread to expat communities across China, from far southern cities like Chongqing and Chendgu to the more isolated western swathes of the country like Shihezi in Xinjiang, 4,000 kilometers away from his starting point in Shanghai.

"Almost three years later, we're still seeing great growth and demand among China expats for our products," he says.

Catering to the growing demand, Jan has expanded his selection beyond just mattresses, and now offers everything from goose down pillows to memory foam beanbags.

It's the tight-knit closeness of China's expat community that has helped his business spread, says Jan.

"It's great fun having China expats as customers. There's a certain sense of comradery amongst foreigners living abroad," he said.

"This added dynamic has made it quite enjoyable. Most seasoned expats seem to want to help newcomers and I'm no exception."

With his mattress prices ranging from 4,000-6,000 RMB ($952) and China's several hundred thousand strong expat population - according to the 2010 census there were 593,382 foreigners living in China - business is good.

Although the price tag may be several times higher than a landlord would spend, for expats who've tried similar products in their home countries they are cheap.

But most importantly for Jan, it's a chance to pursue an original start-up idea while helping expats sleep easy.

"I once helped a couple order and arrange the delivery of their Nestle drinking water after I delivered their new mattress," he says.

"It was a great feeling and I new that SlumberMAAX was more than just a mattress company - it was a platform to welcome and help newcomers, as well as seasoned expats who just landed in this foreign country to feel just a little bit more at home. This added dynamic has made it quite enjoyable."

toddbalazovic@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/18/2013 page20)