Due to a sluggish start to the fiscal year with steep corrections in the market, the pressure on this year’s festive season is huge. In this brand-exclusive series, we speak to brand custodians to understand their FestiveBrandBrief22 for the upcoming season, which, despite the slow start to the year, is likely to provide a much more high-spirited and profitable fiscal.
In this exclusive FestiveBrief22 interaction, Kabir Siddiq, Founder and CEO of SleepyCat, speaks about the new identity and feel of SleepyCat and outlines the brand’s strategy for the 2022 festive season. He highlights SleepyCat’s media mix and emphasizes on its dependence on research and development.
Kabir is the Founder & CEO of SleepyCat, the mattress-in-a-box company. A double major in Economics and Telecommunications from Indiana University Bloomington, Kabir started her career as an investment banker with Deutsche Bank over his four-year stint where he hustled between their Mumbai & Hong Kong offices.
Five years later, he decided to join his family business of the distribution of mattresses and other furniture. He left the Banking & Financial Services sector in 2015 to pursue a more entrepreneurial path, which led him to venture into the Furniture & Mattress industry.
Knowing the various issues that one goes through while investing in a new mattress, he went and penned down his thoughts on a piece of paper to understand how we can make this experience more fun and enjoyable, and also affordable. This inspired him to launch SleepyCat in 2017, creating a premium ‘all-in-one mattress’ product with a direct ‘factory-to-consumer’ model.
Kabir’s extensive research, knowledge, and understanding of the sleep solutions market have led to making SleepyCat a specialized e-commerce sleepy solutions brand that has digitized the experience of buying a mattress with four easy clicks, making it the internet’s most loved & highly rated mattress brand.
In a short span, Kabir has received several awards, including Small business Entrepreneur of the year 2020, Retail Association awards, Runner up in the retail category 2019, and Top 100 start-ups of the year: Sutra HR.
An innovator at heart driving the very values that SleepyCat stands for; Kabir is on a mission to simplify the complex, improve the obsolete, displace the forgotten, and bring value to everyone through a transparently affordable product. Introducing the Indian market to the ‘Bed in a Box’ concept by bringing in a change of innovation and quality to the sleep solutions industry, Kabir’s vision for SleepyCat is to build a culture of being at ease and investing in oneself, one super comfortable product at a time.
Excerpts from the conversation.
What is your 100-word Brief for this festive season?
Our brand is prepared to make the most out of this festive season. August is SleepyCat’s birthday month, thus the preparations begin right at the start of the month. The most awaited festivals fall in this part of the year and we want to capitalize on them the most.
What are the need gaps in the product/service category you compete in? How are you filling those gaps?
We are simplifying mattress shopping. We un-complicate the process of finding the right mattress for every type of sleeper.
Unlike traditional mattress brands, SleepyCat is a complete online brand. We provide direct-from-factory products delivered to over 25k pin codes all over the country.
SleepyCat’s core focus is to provide optimum quality products. Right from the material we use to the final product – we follow a stringent quality check. This is possible due to our in-house production facilities.
Every product that we launch is based on market insights and after understanding the demand gap that thus provides customers with the required solutions. For example, our customer insight was that they needed a mattress that would solve the issue of feeling hot while sleeping. Thus, we launched Ultima mattress with India’s first CoolTEC™️ Fabric that keeps you 4º cooler.
How have your brand- and your brand marketing strategies evolved in these past two years of the pandemic?
We are focused on customer insights – we learn and improvise. Based on the needs of our customers. We have also doubled our RnD process and efforts.
We have launched multiple campaigns with leading influencers and personalities to garner engagement and traction via social media platforms.
In order to distinguish our brand from other competitors and to create a premium positioning, we decided to launch SleepyCat with a new identity and feel.
What is the perfect media mix for your brand? Which are the categories that will see a big uptake in the upcoming Festive season?
It’s a combination of targeted ad campaigns, organic content building, and excessive PR building.
Mattress is the main category for us and we see a high demand for it during the festive season.
Would you recommend more and more brands should also have, in time for the upcoming Festive Season, their own E-commerce platform on the web or app, online, for direct selling to consumers? Why?
Yes, e-commerce is a growing industry and more brands should take advantage of having an online presence.
Your marketing campaigns for the festive season – will they be mostly customer-acquisition-focused, or will there be brand-building elements too? And how important a role is the emerging AI-powered outdoor medium likely to play?
We will be a mix of brand building and customer acquisition based. We haven’t experimented with outdoor media yet.
