a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions in 1979, when the company was acquired by Gulf+Western. Six years later, Gulf+Western sold Simmons to Wickes Corporation. Wesray Capital bought the business in 1986, and sold it to the Simmons employee stock ownership plan in 1989. Merrill Lynch Capital Partners obtained a majority interest in Simmons in 1991, and sold to Investcorp in about 1996. Fenway Partners bought the company about two years later, then sold to Thomas H. Lee Partners in 2003. In the 1990s, a commercial for the Simmons Beautyrest featured a bowling ball being dropped on a Beautyrest mattress and a standard open-coil mattress to illustrate the company's claim that a person's nighttime movements are less likely to disturb a sleep partner if their mattress is a Beautyrest. The bowling ball demonstration, which was popular with Simmons dealers, consumers, and industry experts, was revived in 2006. In 2003, Fenway Partners made the Sleep Country USA chain of retail stores a part of Simmons; in 2006, Simmons sold the chain to The Sleep Train of Citrus Heights, California. The following year, the company added memory foam products to its offerings by acquiring the Comfor–Pedic line of memory foam mattresses and pillows from Comfor Products of Kent, Washington. The company suffered financially under the successive ownership of multiple private equity firms and other private investors. The private equity owners extracted $750 million in profits out of Simmons, while the company's debt increased from $164 million in 1991 to $1.3 billion in 2009. On September 25, 2009, Simmons announced a Chapter 11 restructuring plan and signed a purchase agreement with an investor group led by Ares Management and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. The bankruptcy court approved the deal, reducing the company's total debt from about $1 billion to $450 million. The bankruptcy did not include subsidiaries in Canada and Puerto Rico, but those units were included in the deal with Ares Management and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Ares and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan were also the owners of the Serta brand name under National Bedding Company LLC. They operated Serta and Simmons Bedding as independent entities that continued to compete with one another. On October 2, 2012, private equity firm Advent International acquired a majority interest in AOT Bedding Super Holdings (now Serta Simmons Holdings, LLC), the parent company of Simmons and Serta. Ares Management and the Ontario Teachers' Pension