NASHVILLE — While in-home delivery and setup may be commonplace among mattress sellers, Mattress Firm has seen customers embrace a less traditional shipping option.
Last year, the mattress store chain introduced contactless delivery, Todd Warner, Mattress Firm senior director of logistics and care, said during a Wednesday session at Home Delivery World 2026 in Nashville. The free option involves a driver dropping off the mattress outside the home, while in-home delivery services charge at least $109.99, per Mattress Firm's website. Roughly 25% of the company's deliveries are now contactless, according to Warner.
"It's another way for us to meet the customer where they needed to be met," he said.
Contactless delivery emerged out of previous challenges. Mattress Firm once offered an option called "threshold," in which drivers moved the mattress just past the front door. The expectation was for a threshold delivery to take 15 minutes, but in some instances it could take 45 minutes if the customers convinced drivers to also set up the mattress for them as well, Maryjane Fanizzi, VP of logistics, said in a separate conference session. That created the knock-on effect of drivers being late for subsequent deliveries.
To address the issue, Mattress Firm mulled an Amazon-like delivery option, in which the driver simply drops off the mattress at the customer's front door — "kind of like a drop and run," Fanizzi said. Mattress Firm's delivery team was tasked with rolling out a test of the contactless method first.
"We gave it a test in our Charlotte region, and it was an overwhelming success," Fanizzi said. "The customers came back to us and said, 'I don't have to wait for it. You didn't ring my doorbell. I don't have to sign for it. I was in a meeting and you guys just came, set it down, took your pictures, and you left.'"
After the reported success, Mattress Firm leadership tasked the logistics team with rolling out the capability across the entire U.S. in a month, according to Fanizzi. Scaling the delivery option came with its share of hurdles, as there wasn't full buy-in across all of the sales and operations team.
"Even though we proved it worked, they failed to really grasp onto it," she said, adding that "we had to prove to them not many people are going to steal a 200-to-300-pound mattress on somebody's front door."
Additionally, initial customer satisfaction after scaling wasn't as strong as Mattress Firm's tried-and-true in-home deliveries, Fanizzi said. Communication from salespeople to customers wasn't clear on what free, contactless delivery meant, with the expectation persisting that the driver would still set up the mattress in the home regardless.
"The poor delivery guys are standing there and they're going, 'No, we're not supposed to do that,'" Fanizzi said, adding that the situation caused added frustration for customers.
Eventually, the sales team's messaging adjusted to mitigate future customer friction: free means contactless, with no home entry involved. Consequently, customer satisfaction with contactless deliveries began to improve, scoring similarly to in-home, white-glove deliveries, according to Fanizzi.
"It's normalized back out, which means people have accepted it finally, and they're selling it correctly," Fanizzi said.
