An industrious Spanish bed maker has come up with a novel take on money-hoarding: a mattress with a built-in safe.
April 2, 2013 Leave a comment
March 27, 2013, 11:52 AM
The Mattress Safe: Cushion Your Pain In Spain
By Matthew Walter
An industrious Spanish bed maker has come up with a novel take on money-hoarding: a mattress with a built-in safe.
With many Europeans gripped by anxiety about where to keep their savings, Salamanca-based Descanso Santos Sueños is selling the mattresses for 875 euros ($1,117). At the foot of the bed is a flap which, when pulled back, reveals a 15×10 centimeter door with a keypad. They call it the Caja Micolchon, which translates to My Mattress Safe.
While the mattress firm has been around since 2009, this product was launched just three weeks ago, perfectly timed for a tumultuous bailout in Cyprus that saw some large depositors in Cypriot banks suffer steep losses.
“If it happened in Cyprus, why couldn’t it happen to me?” company president Paco Santos told MarketBeat in a telephone interview.
The company’s marketing strategy plays directly to fears about keeping money in Spain’s banking system. In a commercial streaming on the company’s website, the scene opens with images of crowds demonstrating on the street with riot police nearby. The message “Spanish Banks Collapse…People Can’t Sleep Soundly” splashes across the screen.
Then the Caja MiColchon appears miraculously, and as a man enters his security code to find his euros safe inside, a tear rolls up his cheek and back into his eye. Santos cheekily refers to his company as a financial services firm, and the website features a “return calculator,” where people can key in the amount they deposit to see that it won’t decline with time. The not-so-subtle message is that the same savings would lose value if left in a bank.
Is this a joke? Santos, who said he was laid off in 2009 after a 14-year career at one of Spain’s leading mattress makers, answers the phone number listed on the website himself. He says seven people now work at the company’s home office, and he’s contracted out production of the mattresses to a factory in Portugal. He declined to say how many of the beds have sold so far.
“It’s surpassing all our forecasts,” Santos said.
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