Al Simmons Co Inc history

In 1900 a Canadian inventor patented a mattress with springs held within individual cloth pockets.

Simmons’s son, Zalmon Simmons, Jr., took over the company in 1911.

By 1929, the company had sales of $9 million.

Simmons Co. became profitable again by 1935, and then entered a period of steadily growing sales.

Simmons also came out with new products in the postwar era. It debuted the Hide-A-Bed sofa in 1940, the famous sofa with a mattress tucked inside.

Grant Simmons, Sr., retired in 1957, and his son Grant Simmons, Jr., took over the company.

By 1970 Simmons had also diversified abroad, running foreign subsidiaries to make bedding in Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, England, France, and elsewhere.

The Szymanskis lived in a small flat at 722 American Avenue (now 1972 S. 15th Place) and young Aloysius got his first taste of baseball in the sandlots near Kosciusko Park.

Simmons’s bedding operations began losing money in 1976, and its only profitable units were its international divisions and non-bedding subsidiaries.

In June 1978, the company’s board asked Simmons to resign.

In 1985 Gulf & Western sold Simmons Co. to Wickes, another conglomerate with lumber and furniture holdings.

Then in March 1991 Merrill Lynch Capital Partners offered to buy 60 percent of the company for the astonishingly low price of $32 million.

In March 1996, Merrill Lynch sold its stake in Simmons to a Bahrain-based investment group, Invest-corp.

By 1998 Simmons reported it held over a 15 percent share of the bedding industry, putting it in the number two spot behind Sealy.

Simmons came up with a new brand for the millennium, the Beautyrest 2000 NoFlip mattress.