Miracle on NE 175th Street

Nestled among the strip malls, newer construction and large trees of Woodinville’s main street, looks a little like – as my husband has put it – a business that time forgot. But looks deceive.

Inside the small, blue-green house, owner Greg Wilkinson sells top-quality name-brand carpet and state-of-the-art mattresses he custom builds for his customers. “I always try to sell the finest product,” says Wilkinson. “I try to focus on the best buy for the money.”

There has been a learning curve, he admits.

Wilkinson says he started selling carpets about 25 years ago, marketing them from several locations throughout the area. He moved into his current location in the early 1990s, and specialized in low-price carpeting. “I was just trying to save people money,” he says, adding he “wasn’t the smartest” about the product, and ended up selling inferior merchandise.

So Wilkinson went to work, researching carpet and carpet manufacturers. He brought in quality, stain-resistant, durable carpeting and changed the name of his business from SAVON Carpet to Miracle Carpet Corporation. The business took off, and nowadays he sells carpet to customers throughout the country, and from as far away as Japan and New Zealand.

“For this little store, you wouldn’t believe what I do,” Wilkinson says. “Volume is what speaks to me,” he explains, adding that his low mark-ups have at times gotten him into hot water with competitors and suppliers. “I try to sell the best product for the best price,” he says.

Wilkinson added mattresses – custom-built ones – to his offerings 15 years ago. Again there was a learning curve. Wilkinson says it all started when, suffering from tremendous back pain, he decided to follow a doctor’s suggestion and get a new mattress.

A man who does his homework, Wilkinson made a lot of calls and asked a lot of questions before purchasing a mattress.

“I thought being in agony was part of getting older,” he laughs. As it turned out, the new mattress did the trick…temporarily. But as it began to soften, quickly, Wilkinson’s back pain returned. Troubled by the speed with which a second mattress likewise wore out, he decided to expand his research.

As a retailer, Wilkinson was able to obtain sample mattresses, which he did at a rate of about two a month over several years. As he worked through them, Wilkinson cut apart the mattresses to examine their construction. And he started thinking that maybe he could do better.

He has since researched all the materials that go into building different kinds of mattresses – foam, springs, air cylinders, covers – and identified which manufacturers make the highest quality of each. Now he brings the parts together from all over the country, and assembles the beds in his factory, or on-site at customers’ homes.

“I’m especially proud of my mattresses,” says Wilkinson, adding that he had to learn the craft of mattress-building on his own. “It’s such a lost art,” he says. Wilkinson sells three kinds of mattresses – spring core, foam core and air core, all with foam on top. He says he is “overjoyed” when his products help customers ease their back pain and sleeplessness.

Wilkinson is excited about the prospects for his mattress factory. He recently started advertising a full product line, and the response has been good. “I feel confident I’m going to be able to really do something with this,” he enthuses.

Wilkinson has done it all with the challenges of being autistic. He calls himself an autistic savant, finding the term preferable to others labels he's endured in his lifetime.

Because he has been taken advantage of in the past, Wilkinson says he needs help to realize his ambitions. His goal is to partner with a non-profit to help grow the business, and to channel the profits to charity. “I have limited capacity,” says Wilkinson, explaining that he does some things really well, and others not so well. He hopes that merging with a larger, non-profit organization will allow him to focus on the parts of the business he does best. 

“I’m not in it for the money,” says Wilkinson, reiterating his philosophy of offering the best product for the best price. “I feel much better that way; it makes me happy to save people money.”