Stewart Schaefer has been a leader in the sleep industry for almost three decades.
But his journey to a successful career in the retail industry began after he initially worked in the financial industry – more specifically the commodity markets. Lessons learned in financial world are still being utilized today as President and CEO of Sleep Country Canada and Dormez-vous.
He was born and raised in Montreal and majored in marketing and minored in finance at Concordia University in Montreal.
“I thought I was going to end up being a stockbroker which is where my world originally began,” he said.
“In the last year of university I was managing a tennis club because I love tennis. It’s my number one passion and I had a little bit of extra time on my plate so I went knocking on all the doors of the brokerage houses downtown in Montreal, because I just wanted someone to let me in to polish their shoes or get their lunches.
“And actually finally one firm let me through the door and let me get their lunches, polish their shoes. This was like 35 years ago and eventually one of the brokers brought me into his office and started to let me work on some charts and some analysis with him – like his little helper. And by the end of the summer they offered me a job. It was a company called Dean Witter which is now Morgan Stanley. They offered me a job to go out to Chicago and they would train me to be a commodity broker and trade in the pits in the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.”
To his parents’ chagrin, he packed up and went to Chicago for about two years. He was transferred to New York and was there for about another year and a half. The company then opened up a commodity department in their office in Montreal. Schaefer then moved back home trading commodities from when he was 20 years old for about six or seven years.
“One of my largest accounts was this Taiwanese gentleman who lived in Taiwan and went back and forth from Canada and Taiwan with the Presidents of the Taiwanese associations in Canada. He became very close with me and he was a big trader in commodities but he also, and this is the rub, manufactured brass and wrought iron headboards and footboards in China,” said Schaefer.
“I became very, very close within the Taiwanese community. I learned how to speak Mandarin. I would play mahjong with them on the weekend and one day he asked me to leave my commodity business and help him develop his headboard and footboard business in the United States.
“So once again to my parents’ chagrin the Wall Street boy left the commodity business and I ripped out the backseats of my car and developed a company called Heritage Classic Beds. I drove all along I95 in the U.S. from upper state New York down to Florida and knocking on the doors of furniture stores and mattress stores.”
Schaefer started to build Heritage Classic Beds. The company had a warehouse in Champlain, New York, which is about 30 minutes away from New York.
“One day when I was back in my warehouse I noticed I had a lot of damaged headboards and footboards that I needed to liquidate. So I decided I was going to open a store in Montreal to get rid of my damaged headboards and footboards. I came up with the name for a company called Dormez-vous, which is ‘are you sleeping’,” he said.
“When I went to go set up my first store which is literally going to be 30 years April 1 -my 30-year anniversary is April Fool’s Day – when I went to go set up the headboards and footboards they kept on falling down so I ordered a bunch of mattresses just to hold them up. The next thing I knew when people were coming in to buy my damaged headboards and footboards they were asking about the mattresses also. And the rest is history.”
Six months later, October 1, 1994, Sleep Country opened their first four stores in Vancouver and Schaefer’s brother was attending the University of British Columbia at the time.
“He said to me ‘hey you stupid brother of mine, who quit the Wall Street world to sell mattresses for a living, there’s someone else crazy like you that just opened up here in Vancouver’,” he said.
“So he started taking pictures of Sleep Country – the old Polaroid pictures. I even still have them. They’re in my safety deposit box. It’s like a little memory for myself. And he would send them to me and I would try and emulate everything they were doing because in my mind I used to joke and say if they ever come across the country and come to Montreal, they’ll have to buy me because I’m already Sleep Country.
“Fast forward 10 years later, six stores, I get a knock on the door from Christine Magee (co-founder) and Steve Gunn, CEO and the President, and after a six-hour lunch that we had together that was just fabulous culturally wise, ambition wise, idea wise, I knew this is the place I wanted to be and they bought my business in December of 2005.”
Schaefer, who was the President of Dormez-vous, said the brand went from six stores to 60 stores. He was then asked to take on the merchandising for the entire country and the real estate for Sleep Country. Then the marketing for the entire country. He then introduced ecommerce and then was in charge of mergers and acquisitions.
Over the years, his title changed to Chief Business Development Officer in 2014. A few years later he became the President and CEO of both Sleep Country and Dormez-vous.
“Along that journey, another exciting part of the business was the change of ecommerce which I was the guy not only bringing ecommerce to Sleep Country because we were only a brick and mortar tactile business, I met the folks from Endy in 2015. It took me until 2018 to buy them because nobody thought ecommerce would grow in our industry. So I eventually bought Endy in December 2018,” said Schaefer.
“Then I ended up buying Hush and then last year I bought Silk and Snow and then I bought Casper, who was my number one competitor, in April 2023. We went from $6 million in sales to now close to $1 billion in sales. It’s been a wild ride.”
Schaefer said his experience in the financial world helped him navigate risk and reward in his business.
“It gives me a very strong intuition into the consumer . . . I watch a lot of things people don’t watch. Besides that, I watch spreads on interest rates and currencies, because it’s second nature to me based on the fact of being in that business, but the import/export business I was doing it 30 years ago from China when nobody was actually doing it. And I was intimate in terms of the channels, the actual shipping lines and the channels, and how they move from then until now,” he said.
“And I had the foresight luckily enough based on some of the things I was hearing and seeing and on top of it my brother living in China I knew something was going on with the supply chain and this was before COVID that we needed to adjust and change some things as it related to our business. I follow consumer confidence which is very much related to the stock market all the time.”
