A couple of hundred metres down Pearse St, on the left hand side, is a large, loud yellow sign emblazoned with the words “Mattress Mick’s”. In keeping with its surroundings, there is a profile of Padraig Pearse on the shop window, with a quote from his address at his court martial in Kilmainham Gaol in 1916. Alongside this is an advert for Mattress Mick’s new film, Mattress Men, a documentary following Mick, real name Michael Flynn, and his long-time friend and co-worker, Paul Kelly.
The prominent signage is emblematic of the men who run the shop. I am greeted by the outstretched hand and friendly smile of Kelly, the man behind Mattress Mick’s famous videos. “Pick a mattress and lie down”, he says, waving his hand towards the dozen or so beds as he hands me a cup of coffee. “Mick’s caught in traffic”, he tells me, “but I’ve told him to comb his hair. For the photographs”. While he shows me around the shop and the homemade studio in their office space out the back, we begin chatting about their new documentary, which follows Flynn and Kelly over a three-year period. I ask Kelly about the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto, where the documentary premiered in May. His face immediately lights up, “Ah, it was great”, he grins, “it had always been a dream of mine to see the Niagara Falls”. The film reviews weren’t too bad either.
Mick arrives, his famous hair looking suitably tamed and sporting a tie adorned with rubber ducks. It occurs to me that to call him Flynn feels wrong, given that he’s infinitely better known by his persona. To rupture that feels like an offense, a shattering of an illusion that’s taken on an intimacy. The two men chat while Mick finishes his lunch, and it’s clear how well they get along. Their friendly and open personalities form the basis for their successful business. Mick used to spend much of his day standing at the door of the shop, waving and chatting to anyone and everyone walking past, something Kelly instantly took to when the two began working together. And that’s exactly how the idea for a documentary came about. “I met this guy, Colm Quinn, as he was passing”, Kelly explains, “and it turns out he was a fan of the Mattress Mick videos and he was a filmmaker”. “Yeah, it was supposed to be a 10 to 15 minute documentary but as Mattress Mick became more popular, we were grabbing more people’s attention, and Colm just decided to continue filming and filming and filming”, Mick adds. “It kind of grew legs and went three years down the line”, Kelly agrees.
“Pick a mattress and lie down”, he says, waving his hand towards the dozen or so beds as he hands me a cup of coffee. “Mick’s caught in traffic”, he tells me, “but I’ve told him to comb his hair. For the photographs”.
Mattress Mick’s persona began with sticking up posters around Dublin and making videos in the home-made studio in their shop. “We didn’t want something very sophisticated, because our whole ethos is to be amateurs. There are mistakes in all our videos, we never edited them out, we always left them in. That added, I think, to the fun of the videos and the simplicity of the videos, because people could relate to people making mistakes”, Mick says. True to form, there was only one reason they were going to use Mick himself for the videos: “[We] didn’t know whether to use a cartoon or an actor or me. We decided on me because I was cheaper than anybody else”, he says with a laugh. Online and guerrilla marketing has played an almost unquantifiable role in the building of the Mattress Mick business, thanks in no small part to Kelly. “I knew nothing about social media when I met Paul. He told me that he could do things to get the image out there, he told me about Twitter and Facebook, I knew nothing about them at all. But he did, and this is where we connected very well”, Mick says.
Mick and Kelly make for easy interviewing. They talk happily and enthusiastically about all manner of topics, from Dublin’s social problems and their business strategies to their philosophies on the world. And, inevitably enough, I suppose, they talk to me about how to sell the perfect mattress, regardless of whether it’s the Best hybird mattress or memory foam mattress. “You’re not as good at this as me, are you, Paul?” Mick jabs playfully. “We entertain them a little bit, I get on the mattress with them. Paul does it a different way, he’s more…” “Honest!” Kelly retorts, laughing. “We try to bring a bit of fun into selling mattresses, we want people to remember they were in a Mattress Mick shop.” Mick clearly takes his customer service seriously: “They come here to see me, they come to see Paul, particularly after the movie has been out. The movie is very sensitive, it’s very real. Paul is very…” “Raw and honest”, Kelly finishes. “Yeah”, Mick agrees, “Too honest to be honest with you”.
“The movie is very sensitive, it’s very real. Paul is very…” “Raw and honest”, Kelly finishes. “Yeah”, Mick agrees, “Too honest to be honest with you”.
Mick and Kelly may be getting more media attention now and have their own film in the cinema, but they still know their day job. “I was out last Sunday putting signs up and I will never stop doing it because it gets people to my shop. A lot of people forget that the whole function of Mattress Mick’s is to sell mattresses”, Mick says, leaning forward in his chair. “Guerrilla marketing was cheap, it was effective and it served its purpose. It worked. It really did work.”
Supporting Irish businesses is something the company is passionate about, and something that is of paramount importance to them: “(We want) to become a major player here in the mattress market here in Dublin and hopefully in Ireland, to encourage people to buy Irish-made mattresses which is terribly important to us. We cert our product, we visit our suppliers, we know how they’re made. It helps people stay in the country. My daughter had to emigrate and I didn’t like that. Now, thank God, she’s back and I want to try keep as much funds in the country as possible rather than buy imported mattresses.”
The two men certainly speak with an air of confidence and authority. They know what they’re about, and they know what they’re doing. They have seen their business grow, and with the continued development of their website, mattressmick.ie, they have seen their sales rise steadily through a new avenue. Mattress Mick has become a well-known figure in Dublin, but they didn’t always have it so easy. Watching their Youtube videos or walking past the bright and inviting shop front, you would never guess just how far Mick and Kelly have come. Theirs is a classic story of having to reinvent themselves due to the recession, having to try something different and build a business.
“I met Paul by chance in the Yacht pub in Clontarf and I started talking about my problems, he told me about his problems”, Mick tells me, describing how Mattress Mick began. “In ‘08/’09 I had a pretty substantial business, but it went into turmoil because the recession hit. There was growing competition, I was locked into shopping centre rents which are terribly high.” “I was made redundant twice within three years after the recession hit”, Kelly adds, “and I was quite down and depressed”. After deciding to go self-employed, Kelly did what he could to improve his situation. “It hasn’t been an easy road, but once you focus your mind on something, you put down positive affirmations around anything is really possible”, he asserts. “I remember 20 years ago [passing the shop] and seeing Mick standing there waving his hand and I remember going ‘One day I’d like to be a happy business man myself’, and there’s me now standing introducing myself which created a film, like. Everything happens for a reason”, he stoically adds.
Kelly and Mick are under no illusions as to how hard they have worked to create Mattress Mick and reach the stage they are at now. “We’ve made it happen, like…I had to sell mattresses, I needed to sell mattresses”, Mick stresses. “Nothing will happen if you do nothing, you’ll never get anywhere doing nothing. You’ve got to focus and keep going, that’s what I believe”, Kelly adds. Mick’s former business, the one that ran into trouble during the recession, was called Northside Furniture. From his vast experience of owning a business in Dublin, Mick knew he couldn’t just open up another shop, one that would blend in with the hundreds of other shop fronts. He needed something different.
Watching their Youtube videos or walking past the bright and inviting shop front, you would never guess just how far Mick and Kelly have come. Theirs is a classic story of having to reinvent themselves due to the recession, having to try something different and build a business.
“This Mattress Mick character was my way of getting more mattresses sold. It was quirky, it was different”. Whilst the recession forced the closure of his original business, Mick recognises that he wouldn’t be here in his current guise without it. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think this was going to happen”, he says of the film and his notoriety. “It only happened because of the recession, because I failed in my previous business so I couldn’t continue. This is why we are here now as Mattress Mick, this is why we are getting all the attention. But it would never have happened had I continued as Northside Furniture.” This reinventing and rebranding has helped add a new dimension to his sales ability. “What is Northside Furniture?” he continues, “It’s just the name of a furniture store, but Mattress Mick is a face, he’s a personality. He’s just a different kind of character and the Irish people, Dublin people particularly, they have come to kind of like me. There’s a great sense of good will about what we’ve done”. Mick is focused on selling his mattresses and making sure his business does as well as it can. The rest is all just an added bonus.
At first glance, Mick and Kelly seem like they are just two happy Dublin men, Mick with his wild hair and colourful tie and Kelly with his wide smile and his friendly face. But from talking to them, the adversity they have come through is clear, and it’s what keeps them motivated to keep improving their business. Mick has plans for future franchise expansion around Ireland, and Kelly, coming from a background in computing, is working to grow the sales on mattressmick.ie.
“When Colm approached me”, Kelly says, going back to the documentary, “I said to him that day ‘This film will do very well.’ And it has. It has done very well. I knew I had to be 100 per cent open and honest”. The documentary focuses a lot on Kelly and his integral role in creating the Mattress Mick persona. It’s obvious why his story warrants so much attention. “I knew I had to be 100 per cent open and honest to tell the story of a Dublin man trying to better his life, trying to get a home for his kids. All I wanted was to live with my family, and we’re in the situation where it’s overcrowded at the moment so I can’t live with my two little girls. Like, I’m a father who loves his girls and can’t live with his girls because [of] the way Dublin is today”. Mick is aware of just how important Kelly’s honesty is in the film: “It makes the movie. It makes it, it really does”.
For all the extras they do, Kelly and Mick just want to run a successful business at the end of the day. “I just want to be a really strong force in the mattress industry here in Ireland”, Mick says.
Since news of the film first emerged near the beginning of 2016, awareness of Mattress Mick has grown even more. “It’s very, very nice”, Mick says. “It’s great to be recognised. Sometimes it can be a little bit intrusive”, but, ever the businessman, Mick sees the positives: “You overcome that when you see the benefits of sales coming in, people are coming in to buy mattresses, which is the whole purpose of this campaign.” Thanks to their aggressive marketing campaign, Mattress Mick has received attention from celebrities like Stephen Fry, as well as many other news outlets: “RTÉ copped us, some other journalists copped us, and we were invited to more media events. We were a little bit naive when we started off. If we want to talk to somebody [now] we will. We have a lot of funny ones coming up to us, trying to annoy us more than anything else. They pretended to be journalists. You get a lot of phone calls like that, but they’re only messing with you. Now we know who the messers are.”
For all the extras they do, the videos, the documentary, an appearance as Donald Trump on The Republic of Telly, Kelly and Mick just want to run a successful business at the end of the day. “I just want to be a really strong force in the mattress industry here in Ireland. Paul is working hard on the website, we’re getting hotels, we’re getting small guest houses. People are coming to respect us. They trust us a little bit more now because we’re in the media”, Mick says. Towards the end of our discussion he once again repeats a theme he and Kelly have mentioned over and over again: “If you have a plan or a dream, go for it. Don’t get distracted.” For all the joking around on screen and the creation of the Mattress Mick character with his wild hair, Michael Flynn and Paul Kelly are serious business men. “Be tunnel-visioned towards achieving what you want to achieve and you will achieve it.” “Set yourself goals”, Kelly insists, “and follow your inner guidance”. “It can be very difficult sometimes”, Mick continues. “You know, you get knocks, you get blows, but keep going, don’t stop and you’ll get it eventually. I’d give that advice to any young person. The system doesn’t help young people very well, particularly people who want to start their own business, it’s a hard job but just go for it”.
These are two men who are speaking with direct experience. They have experience of just how hard “the system” can be and they know what it’s like to see yourself fail, but they also know that working hard and believing in yourself are sure-fire ways to overcome that. “All I want to be is a successful businessman. Well, more successful”, Mick tells me. And the two of them know how to do it. “If I focus, if I work hard”, Kelly concludes, “if I prove that I can do great at work and build up and get a house one day. Maybe I’ll have that happily ever after one day”.
