Photos by Shaban Athuman/Staff Photographer Susan Dickinson measures a travel case for a pillow at the Pillow Bar. The business sells to 268 retailers and designers in the U.S. and Canada and to boutique hotels and resorts.
Pillow Bar gets an Oprah rush
Accessory’s must-buy status fuels holiday orders
ENTREPRENEURS| DALLAS
Merrimac Dillon kinda wishes she and her staff at the Pillow Bar hadn’t taken off an extended weekend for Thanksgiving.
Spending just one day to count blessings with family and friends might have created less stress this week as they try to handle a constant deluge of orders, thanks to the Oprah effect.
But then again, Dillon, 59, has plenty to feel blessed about.
Christmas came special delivery in October, when the editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, told Dillon that Oprah had selected the Pillow Bar’s Jetsetter Mini travel pillow for her list of 107 must-buy holiday gifts.
Oprah’s Favorite Things is known for decadent desserts, ingenious gadgets and unusual finds in home, fashion and beauty. And, as Oprah says in the December issue of O: “These hypoallergenic neck pillows with a washable cover make circling Detroit just another opportunity to nap.”
These are angelic words from commerce heaven for a small company that manufactures custom pillows amid warehouses on Howell Street in the Dallas Design District.
“At the Dallas summer home and gift market in July, Oprah’s editor ordered our Jetsetter Mini travel pillows for her staff to try, and voila, she chose them for Oprah’s Christmas list for the under-$50 category,” Dillon says. “We are thrilled and busy, busy little elves.”
A tad busier than she expected.
“It’s been like a bulldozer showed up,” she says Monday as she and her workers fill Minis with air-blown fluff, embroider Oprah sayings on the cotton covers, wrap and box them in controlled chaos. Errant plumes of down-alternative filler float in the air.
Build-a-pillow Ten years ago, Dillon invented a now-patented machine (in the garage of her Preston Hollow home) that plumps pillows with just the right amount of goose down or down-alternative filler to suit individual sleepers. Think Build-a-Bear for rest-weary adults.
She’d complained for years about not finding a perfect pillow that she could take with her as she traveled with her daughter to horse shows.
When her husband was plagued with sleep issues after a serious back injury, she couldn’t find a pillow on the market to solve them.
“It was Rich’s back problems that threw me into the world of chiropractors and neurosurgeons and gave me the impetus to do this,” she says.
Dillon has never met the Queen of Influences, but she’s well aware of the Oprah effect.
Two other Pillow Bar products were featured in O magazine this year: the fullsize sleeping pillow in May and the Texas Boyfriend shirt in August.
“We did very well with both the pillows and the boyfriend shirts," Dillon says. “And our other products, too." So she’d anticipated a happy onslaught — just not quite to this extent.
She, her staff of eight and a small legion of holiday workers made 1,000 in each of the Mini’s three colors and embroidered Oprah’s messages on them in advance of Oprah’s big reveal on Good Morning America three weeks ago.
That’s six times the 500 Minis she had sold in the five previous holiday seasons.
“But that definitely wasn’t enough,” she says. “Most of those are already out of the door. Some people have already reordered." The royal blue “Bon Voyage" Mini has been the best seller by far. The hot pink “Life’s a journey" and aqua “Love your best life" pillows are running an even-but distant second.
“It’s alway a crapshoot. You never know what will sell,” Dillon says. “I really thought it would be the aqua. But all of the ones we’re making now are blue.
“The best part is that more people are visiting our website and getting pillows with their own personal massage or initials.
“It’s all good.”
Sleep snobbery
So what makes these travel pillows worth 50 bucks?
According to the company’s marketing spiel, the Minis are made of a “proprietary blend of hypo-allergenic, washable polyester fiberfill” that is “Never lumpy or bumpy like ball fiber or latex, but so down-like in feel that it will fool even the most knowledgeable pillow snob. 14”x14” of neck-hugging comfort.”
The Pillow Bar sells to 268 retailers and designers in the United States and Canada and to boutique hotels and resorts, including the Granduca in Austin and Houston and the Baccarat Hotel in New York City. It offers its products online at thepillowbar.com but at slightly higher prices so she doesn’t squeeze out Dillon's retail partners.
She has expanded the line to include US. - milled towels, sheets, bathrobes, dog beds, seersucker PJ sets and other U.S.-made luxury accessories.
As much as possible, Dillon wants to spread her success to other small Lone Star enterprises, using a Dallas sewing house and a shirtmaker and a dyeing facility in El Paso.
Dillon is having to refigure her company’s math, since she’s now expecting to sell 3,000 Minis. That would be an infusion of more than $150,000 on top of the just under $2 million in sales she'd expected for 2018 before this. Add in other products that are selling more briskly, and the Oprah windfall is more like a 10 percent gust.
“The most exciting part of being included in Oprah’s Christmas list is that it is great for telling people that we custom-make pillows for sleeping and travel,” says Dillon. “That's a hard message to convey to a broad audience when you are a small company. Being included helps us share why we are different." Twitter: @CherylHall_DMN
Merrimac Dillon kinda wishes she and her staff at the Pillow Bar hadn’t taken off an extended weekend for Thanksgiving.
Spending just one day to count blessings with family and friends might have created less stress this week as they try to handle a constant deluge of orders, thanks to the Oprah effect.
But then again, Dillon, 59, has plenty to feel blessed about.
Christmas came special delivery in October, when the editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, told Dillon that Oprah had selected the Pillow Bar’s Jetsetter Mini travel pillow for her list of 107 must-buy holiday gifts.
Oprah’s Favorite Things is known for decadent desserts, ingenious gadgets and unusual finds in home, fashion and beauty. And, as Oprah says in the December issue of O: “These hypoallergenic neck pillows with a washable cover make circling Detroit just another opportunity to nap.”
These are angelic words from commerce heaven for a small company that manufactures custom pillows amid warehouses on Howell Street in the Dallas Design District.
“At the Dallas summer home and gift market in July, Oprah’s editor ordered our Jetsetter Mini travel pillows for her staff to try, and voila, she chose them for Oprah’s Christmas list for the under-$50 category,” Dillon says. “We are thrilled and busy, busy little elves.”
A tad busier than she expected.
“It’s been like a bulldozer showed up,” she says Monday as she and her workers fill Minis with air-blown fluff, embroider Oprah sayings on the cotton covers, wrap and box them in controlled chaos. Errant plumes of down-alternative filler float in the air.
Build-a-pillow Ten years ago, Dillon invented a now-patented machine (in the garage of her Preston Hollow home) that plumps pillows with just the right amount of goose down or down-alternative filler to suit individual sleepers. Think Build-a-Bear for rest-weary adults.
She’d complained for years about not finding a perfect pillow that she could take with her as she traveled with her daughter to horse shows.
When her husband was plagued with sleep issues after a serious back injury, she couldn’t find a pillow on the market to solve them.
“It was Rich’s back problems that threw me into the world of chiropractors and neurosurgeons and gave me the impetus to do this,” she says.
Dillon has never met the Queen of Influences, but she’s well aware of the Oprah effect.
Two other Pillow Bar products were featured in O magazine this year: the fullsize sleeping pillow in May and the Texas Boyfriend shirt in August.
“We did very well with both the pillows and the boyfriend shirts," Dillon says. “And our other products, too." So she’d anticipated a happy onslaught — just not quite to this extent.
She, her staff of eight and a small legion of holiday workers made 1,000 in each of the Mini’s three colors and embroidered Oprah’s messages on them in advance of Oprah’s big reveal on Good Morning America three weeks ago.
That’s six times the 500 Minis she had sold in the five previous holiday seasons.
“But that definitely wasn’t enough,” she says. “Most of those are already out of the door. Some people have already reordered." The royal blue “Bon Voyage" Mini has been the best seller by far. The hot pink “Life’s a journey" and aqua “Love your best life" pillows are running an even-but distant second.
“It’s alway a crapshoot. You never know what will sell,” Dillon says. “I really thought it would be the aqua. But all of the ones we’re making now are blue.
“The best part is that more people are visiting our website and getting pillows with their own personal massage or initials.
“It’s all good.”
Sleep snobbery
So what makes these travel pillows worth 50 bucks?
According to the company’s marketing spiel, the Minis are made of a “proprietary blend of hypo-allergenic, washable polyester fiberfill” that is “Never lumpy or bumpy like ball fiber or latex, but so down-like in feel that it will fool even the most knowledgeable pillow snob. 14”x14” of neck-hugging comfort.”
The Pillow Bar sells to 268 retailers and designers in the United States and Canada and to boutique hotels and resorts, including the Granduca in Austin and Houston and the Baccarat Hotel in New York City. It offers its products online at thepillowbar.com but at slightly higher prices so she doesn’t squeeze out Dillon's retail partners.
She has expanded the line to include US. - milled towels, sheets, bathrobes, dog beds, seersucker PJ sets and other U.S.-made luxury accessories.
As much as possible, Dillon wants to spread her success to other small Lone Star enterprises, using a Dallas sewing house and a shirtmaker and a dyeing facility in El Paso.
Dillon is having to refigure her company’s math, since she’s now expecting to sell 3,000 Minis. That would be an infusion of more than $150,000 on top of the just under $2 million in sales she'd expected for 2018 before this. Add in other products that are selling more briskly, and the Oprah windfall is more like a 10 percent gust.
“The most exciting part of being included in Oprah’s Christmas list is that it is great for telling people that we custom-make pillows for sleeping and travel,” says Dillon. “That's a hard message to convey to a broad audience when you are a small company. Being included helps us share why we are different." Twitter: @CherylHall_DMN