DENVER — The Better Mattress, the only Black-owned mattress store in Colorado, is preparing to open a new location.
“I've been in the industry for 34 years. I’m a Colorado native, been doing this for a long time. I’m fortunate to have worked with quite a few of the largest mattress retailers here and furniture retailers here in Colorado. But after COVID, it was kind of an eye-opening type of thing. I was just tired of working for corporate, and I was like, 'You know what? Not only do I know this business like the back of my hand, but from an African American perspective, we are literally in the 1% category, I guess, when it comes to owners of a mattress retail shop,'” said Randy Davis, owner of The Better Mattress.
Davis helped launch Denver Mattress in 1995, and about a year ago, Davis opened his first store on Colorado Boulevard in Denver.
“We have a lot of local manufacturers here… but our biggest niche is we carry a lot of the products that are online — like Helix, Tuft and Needle, Bear and soon to be Leesa — that consumers see online but they can't try it. And we're the only place in town that they can come try it before they buy it. So it's been a very big success for us,” Davis said.
Davis said he’s proud to be a locally-owned business.
“My wife and I are, you know, we're in this together. And it's, you know, it's very important for us,” he said. “There's a lot of emphasis when a Black business is featured on usually hair or food, but nothing that are the ancillary things. And, you know, to be able to provide something that is a little bit more diverse and something unique, and not necessarily unique because everybody sleeps, but the fact that we have or at least I have a foothold in it, it makes me very proud and very blessed.”
Davis even designed his own mattress collection.
“It's called the Camelot Collection, kind of a Renaissance guy. [It] had... the Lancelot and Guinevere and the Arthur. And it's unique because they have three different comfort levels. Therapeutic is the manufacturer that makes it for us as a local company. But they're tremendous for us,” Davis said.
Davis is planning to open a second location in Lone Tree in September.
