The Sleep Company’s revolutionary innovation – SmartGRID tech

The Sleep Company highly regarded for its revolutionary SmartGRID tech has come a long way since its debut in November 2019. The Sleep Company produces, manufactures and owns the patent to Asia’s first and only comfort-tech solution – the SmartGRID mattress.

In an exclusive interaction with Priyanka Salot, Co-Founder, The Sleep Company, we look at how the evolving sleep market taking up smart products:

How has the company progressed/evolved since its establishment?

The Sleep Company began with the single insight that even though we all spend an average of 26 years (or 2,27,760 hours) of our life on a mattress, very little innovation has gone into elevating that experience. While awareness of the criticality of sleep is prevalent, innovation beyond the conventional hadn’t been explored. The mattress market specifically in Asia saw its last big disruption in the 1960s when memory foam was invented.

Spurred by this single insight and driven by the desire to be at our most efficient, as new parents, our (my husband and i) search for the perfect mattress led us down a path to create one of the biggest disruptions in Asia’s comfort solutions market. While The Sleep Company made its debut in November 2019, it has been a long journey from conception to innovation that included years of thorough research and hours of product trials. Bringing in a revolutionary solution like our SmartGRID tech has been our greatest achievement and the success we have seen in just a few years is a testament to that effort.

Our debut into the market was marked by a steady increase in growth and sales, which motivated us to believe that the Indian customer was eager and ready for a solution like ours. We grew by 10x during the lockdown, are among the top four brands on Amazon and the highest-rated mattress brand in the digital marketplace overall. We also recently introduced a slew of smart comfort  accessories that include – seat cushions, back cushions and adjustable pillows based on our SmartGRID technology as well as knitted blankets. This coupled with our biggest festive season sale now puts us on track to achieve a 100 CR run-rate by November 2021 (exactly two years since inception). It’s our aim to cross the 500 CR mark in the next 4-5 years. Furthermore, we have recently raised INR 13.4 CR in pre-series A funding which is being put towards strengthening our product, team and brand awareness. The Sleep Company has grown from a small team to more than 100 now, with 20,000+ customers and we’ve even launched our first brand campaign with our first-ever ambassador Anil Kapoor, who was our customer first.

With a customer-centric approach, the vision for The Sleep Company is to become the World’s Best Comfort Technology Company, changing the way people sleep and sit.

Does The Sleep Company manufacture its own smart mattresses? Is it a tech-intensive process?

Crafted with Sleep Science at its foundation, The Sleep Company produces, manufactures and owns the patent to Asia’s first and only comfort-tech solution – the SmartGRID mattress. Created with a super-stretchy smart polymer, the SmartGRID technology was created in collaboration with ex-DRDO material scientist Dr. Tripathi, and features a signature grid-based design.

Backed wholly by science The Sleep Company’s SmartGRID tech is a revolutionary innovation that, with its innovative design and composition enables:

• Superior Ergonomics: intelligently designed to ensure that it is soft in certain places like your hips and shoulders while firm in places where it should be like your back, giving you advanced levels of posture support
• Motion Isolation: cancels out any kind of disturbance caused by the person sleeping next to you. Enjoy movement-free, and zero partner disturbance
• Temperature Control: The cooling fabric quilted premium softcover comes with 2500 air channels that don’t trap body heat like a memory foam mattress. It allows for optimum airflow not only adds to the bounciness but also helps in regulating temperature
• Extreme Durability: doesn’t sag or sink like other foam, latex, or memory mattresses.  The ultra-elastic material will ensure that you experience zero sagging

What is the smart mattress market like in India? Is there acceptance?

The mattress market for years has been split between an unorganized and organized marketplace, with unbranded products monopolizing the space purely on the basis of price point. But over the last year and a half, there has been a significant shift in consumer perception when it comes to lifestyle products that offer a very specific health-related value proposition. This meant that with physical and mental health being of prime importance, products like an ergonomically supportive mattress were no longer being viewed as a luxury or a lifestyle choice, but an investment in an overall healthier lifestyle that extended to a much wider consumer base.

Today’s customer is digital savvy, quality-conscious and perfectly capable of making informed decisions based on their awareness and willingness to research, compare product material as well as technology. With that, today’s smart mattress customers come from tier 2 and 3 cities as well as metros. The Sleep Company’s products sit within the mass premium segment of comfort and sleep solutions, and 65% of our revenue comes from the top 35 cities in the country.

How does the company educate the consumers about the smart mattress? How has the feedback been from the customers?

Being a digitally native brand, customer-centricity sits at the core of everything that we do. We thrive on customer engagement as well as feedback and make a conscious effort to establish one-on-one interactions with customers in order to have a better understanding of their needs, queries or concerns. And in some cases, I even take to the digital marketplace myself to respond to customers.

Customers have expressed gratitude for the promptness with which the company responds to queries regarding our products. It’s also helped us figure out what needs to be fixed or refocused. Listening to their comments has assisted us in identifying problem areas that we can address in the future to provide a better customer experience.

Additionally, our 100-day free trial adds to the appeal and provides a proof of concept for our customers. Once they see the kind of impact the grid mattress can have on their sleep there is a definite belief in the technology that begins to settle in. and the proof is in the response we’ve received so far – we are among the top four brands on Amazon and are the highest-rated mattress brand in the digital marketplace overall.

What is the company’s outlook?

Our ambitions for comfort tech solutions go beyond mattresses. We are actively working towards introducing our grid-based disruptive creations to a broader range of products within this market – with our recently introduced smart sleep accessories being the beginning of these ambitions. Our product roadmap for the near future is to extend our catalog to include furniture as well. In fact, we’ve recently launched premium wooden beds considering they are usually bought together with a mattress.

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From a business and brand perspective, apart from the plans, we have based on the funds we’ve just raised, the next year will see us really amping up the momentum and drive when it comes to brand awareness. With the introduction of the new range of innovative comfort solutions coupled with its biggest sale, we are poised to achieve the projected run rate of 100 CR by November 2021.

Additionally, it is our vision to be pioneers in Asia of the exclusively patented SmartGRID technology based on sleep science and with that, our plans to expand our operations to international markets like Japan are imminent.