y.  “The burgeoning issue of poor sleep isn’t just a headline – it’s a reality for nearly half of the adult population,” Lucas said. “Sleep isn’t a luxury; it’s a health imperative.” The business realised that in order to make a bigger difference in people’s lives it needed to reach sleep-deprived Australians, and after a transformative trip to Retail’s Big Show in New York City in 2020, the board decided to kickstart that process. Sitting in on a discussion with Nordstrom’s CEO Erik Nordstrom, Forty Winks’ director Cameron van den Dungen was inspired by Nordstrom’s explanation of how the business had reinvented itself so many times.  “He said, ‘very early on, we as a family and as a business realised that for every year we get older our customer gets older too… and at some stage we need to go looking for someone new to grow old with’,” Van den Dungen told Inside Retail.  “That night over dinner, we had a robust debate as to whether we knew who we were going to grow old with in the future.” As a result, the business then conducted market research for a year and found that while its proposition was incredibly attractive to this group of younger consumers, it hadn’t been marketing to them at all.  Reaching the Unslept According to Van den Dungen, potential new customers simply didn’t know what Forty Winks was, or what it offered.  “We just weren’t talking to them,” he said. “These insights led us to develop a new communications campaign to start to educate our desired consumer about [the business].” The resulting campaign, which launched in September, mixes humour and branding to showcase sleep-deprived Australians as zombies — shuffling toward a Forty Winks store, where staff are prepared to deal with ‘the Unslept’.  The plan was to candidly showcase the reality of those sleep-deprived Australians, while also putting Forty Winks front and centre as a means to combat the issue.  “It’s not just about standing out; it’s about making the topic of sleep issues more approachable and relatable,” Lucas said.  “It’s not just about making them laugh. It’s about showcasing our unparalleled expertise and capability in helping them improve their sleep.” The goal, according to Van den Dungen, is to drive awareness and positive perceptions of the brand with its desired audience. To him, the focus is on educating Forty Winks’ customers about what makes them uniquely positioned to help solve sleep issues. Another day The next area of focus for the business is physical and digital expansion, according to Forty Winks’ chairperson Guyan Stroud.  “In the next six to 12 months we anticipate the exciting opening of three to four new stores in different regions, although the challenges posed by rental costs can make this endeavour complex,” Stroud told Inside Retail.  “As for our evolving e-commerce platform, we recognise the importance of online shopping for modern customers [and] are enhancing our online presence to ensure that people can find and purchase the right beds and mattresses for their needs.” In fact, the past 12 months have been instrumental for the Forty Winks business. As many other homewares-adjacent brands saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, Forty Winks enjoyed unprecedented sales growth as customers spent more time at home. However, the business is now seeing that demand normalise back to more regular sales conditions, which is represented by a “modest dip in sales performance”, according to Stroud.  “That’s just the reality of consumers adjusting their spending priorities as international travel returns and cost-of-living pressures start to bite,” he said.