Getting my futon the door

KING of beds Mattress Mick has ★written his memoir of how he went from a struggling furniture salesman to a cult figure. In Bouncing Back, Mattress Mick - real name Michael Flynn - tells of his childhood in Dublin's inner-city Pearse Street and how he developed his entrepreneurial spirit. He opens up about how he nearly lost ★ it all, but came back from the brink to be bigger than ever. In this chapter from the book, he tells how he came up with the character of Mattress Mick - and how he has Stephen Fry to thank for his success.

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SO that was where I was that fateful evening in The Yacht, when I ran into Paul Kelly.

Within a few days, we'd had our second meeting in the same pub, and Mattress Mick was born. Our slogan was: “Irish-made mattresses at unbelievable prices”. Genius.

Paul threw himself into helping me build the Mattress Mick persona. He set up the social media pages, started filming videos, and before I knew it,things started moving fast.

We took a photo outside the shop on Pearse Street, me with a big cheesy grin and my hand stuck out like I was mid-high-five.

That picture blew up online. It became the image. The unofficial Mattress Mick logo. The red jacket I wear would also become synonymous as my Mattress Mick costume.

We went full guerrilla warfare on the marketing front, with posters, flyers, even cardboard cutouts of my mug.

You couldn't walk down the street without bumping into me.

FIGHTER

Luckily, I had a few mates who helped me with stock, and the momentum was building. Mattress Mick, the mattress price fighter, was suddenly everywhere.

Things had already started picking up, and Mattress Mick was making small waves but nothing could have prepared me for this.

One day in 2015, completely out of the blue, we found out that Stephen Fry - yes, the Stephen Fry, the English national treasure - had spotted the posters of me up by the Five Lamps. There I was with a big cheesy grin, arms flung out. It's no surprise he saw me: like the rest of Dublin, he had no choice.