Manufacturer Plucks Profits From Down Products -- Pacific Coast Feather Offers Comforts Of Home

Down, down, down means sky-high revenues for Pacific Coast Feather Co.

Seattle-based Pacific Coast Feather makes 12 million pillows and a half-million comforters a year, selling them to many of the nation's retail giants, including J.C. Penney, Bloomingdale's and Kmart.

Its down also is shipped to Asia, where textile workers stitch high-end parkas and other clothing for the U.S. market.

Chairman Jerry Hanauer, whose family has been in the down and feather-bedding business for four generations, said revenue climbed to $102 million in 1995. He expects 1996 revenue to top $125 million.

Hanauer's mustachioed grandfather, Joseph Hanauer, got started in the feather-pillow business in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1884. The Hanauer family came to Seattle and bought a small bedding business in 1939, forming Pacific Coast Feather.

Jerry Hanauer coordinates the global business from Seattle headquarters near the Kingdome. Five family members, including three of his sons, are involved today, and the company employs up to 800 workers, depending on the season.

"We're the dominant factor in the high-end down comforters and pillows in the United States," said Hanauer. Retailers sell the pillows for $20 to $130 and comforters at $100 to $500, although the company's top-end products include $1,500 comforters.

Pacific Coast Feather orchestrated long-term growth by focusing on core down and feather products and eliminating peripheral and

low-end textiles in the '80s, Hanauer said.

The market has boomed as stay-at-home Americans spend more on home comforts. Consumers are coming to view down bedding as mainstream, not luxury items, marketers say. Pacific Coast Feather's fastest-growing segment is down comforters in the $300-to-$400 range.

A marketing and merchandising makeover also is propelling the company's sales. It consolidated products under the Pacific Coast Feather brand, implemented national television advertising, redesigned packaging and boosted its consumer-education program. Marketing Vice President Raymond Dornbusch, who joined the company two years ago, was key to the strategy.

Pacific Coast Feather continues to build production capacity, with seven manufacturing plants in Toronto, Los Angeles, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Washington. Hanauer plans to open a Tennessee pillow-manufacturing plant later this year.

The company supplies its plants with "the finest down anywhere in the world," bought in Asia and Europe from poultry processors, Dornbusch said. Raw goose and duck feathers are shipped to the company's Marysville plant, which operates 24 hours a day and processes about 4,000 metric tons of feathers each year.

The down and feathers are washed eight times and filtered 15 times to remove dirt, dust and allergens. That produces Pacific Coast Feather's trademarked Hyperclean down, which it guarantees to be hypoallergenic.

Pacific Coast Feather's down ends up in a range of products, including jackets and vests sold by Eddie Bauer and Land's End.

In the Northwest market, Pacific Coast Feather expects to benefit from expansion of giant home-products retail chains, such as Bed, Bath & Beyond and Linens 'n Things. The company also is testing Pacific Coast Feather specialty shops within retail stores such as J.C. Penney. In addition to comforters, featherbeds and accessories, customers will find pillow "testing sites" where they can sink their heads right into the soft down.