In front of his desk is a very plush maroon leather armchair with matching loveseat and ottoman. Whether in his spacious office, out back in his mattress factory, or in one of his “land yachts,” Avedis Balmanoukian is about comfort.
Balmanoukian, the owner of Sommex Maritime, located in a Stellarton industrial park, started in the furniture business in 1975 as a travelling manufacturer’s rep.
“When you’re beginning, new on the block, nobody would give you their lines to rep so you start with small stuff,” he said.
He began by travelling Atlantic Canada in a station wagon filled with rolls of carpet samples, and also took on a small line of furniture from Quebec.
“The carpet helped me quite a bit because it was quick. In furniture, you have to wait until the manufacturer delivers to get your commission. But carpet was quick. I got a check every month,” said Balmanoukian.
“In furniture, I took a company that was doing five thousand dollars a year in this territory, which even then was peanuts, nothing. I took it and really worked hard at it, and they were very co-operative people, and I brought their volume in 1979 to a million dollars.”
He got his start in the mattress business buying them from a manufacturer in Trois-Rivieres, Que., and selling them to “mom and pop stores” in the Maritimes. After five years of that, a local bedding company went bankrupt, and soon he was really soft at it.
“I got lucky because when I took over the company, a lot of former MacGregor Bedding employees came with us and those guys were experienced; they knew what to do.”
Sommex has moved twice since opening in 1987, working up to a space that’s 78,000 square feet plus an annex, originally built for a now defunct electronics factory. Past gigantic rolls of foam is the mattress-making machinery, including a quilter that combines fabric and foam into bed panels, and a machine that twists a spool of 13-gauge steel into coils, 90 of them a minute.
The men who run the machinery are taught on site and all do a variety of jobs. Queen size mattresses are the top seller across the industry, but the setup of the Sommex factory allows it to also build non-standard beds, like mattresses for boats and other oddities.
. 4, 2021. - Ryan Taplin“In the Maritimes, people still use old antique beds, which are 48 inches but not regular length. The regular length for a single bed, a 48-inch bed, is 75 inches, but those old beds were 72,” Balmanoukian said of that niche market.
“We make good money on it because we charge an extra 25 per cent for special sizes.
“We can’t buy anything locally, and the one that really sticks out is the lumber that we make box springs with,” said Balmanoukian.
“Would you believe I cannot buy that lumber in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick? It’s spruce, but it has to be kiln-dried and 1x3. The mills here, first of all, not too many have kilns and they’d rather sell 2x4 and 2x6 and 2x8 than 1x3. So, my lumber comes from Quebec.”
The factory can build more than 100 mattresses in a day, depending on specs provided by the customer. Nursing homes and universities are important customers.
“Those are big orders. Two years ago we did Acadia, which we had never done business with before, and we had a whopping order for 1,100 mattresses.
“I always compare a mattress to a sandwich. How good it is depends on what’s in it,” said Balmanoukian, who does the bulk of his business in eastern Nova Scotia.
“In town here, I’ve got three dealers, I’ve got Antigonish and Cape Breton. The only weak spot I’ve got right now, which is bad, is Halifax. Because of the majors up there it means there are not too many independent stores left.”
Balmanoukian said he took his lumps over the years, but his business is very solid. He says the figures provided in an online profile of Sommex by an accounting firm claiming he has 17 employees and annual revenue of more than $3 million are out of date and inaccurate. He also doesn’t want to divulge the number of his employees or dealers in order to keep that information away from a competitor in New Brunswick.
“They hate me with a passion, they despise me, although they are about 50 times bigger than I am,” said the 79-year-old who has no retirement plan.
“My family wants me to hang up my skates, but I enjoy what I’m doing.”
