2007-09The ecosystem he measures against begins. Flipkart, Myntra and that cohort start around then, which makes Indian startups only fourteen or fifteen years old. His reading of the violent ups and downs since is that they are mostly global liquidity arriving and leaving.
2015Two closed startups meet at a Coffee Day. Chaitanya had just shut two of his and Ankit one, and they met at a Sequoia-funded company where Ankit reported to him across a nine-year age gap. Six months later came the hunch: Ankit knew what raw material and labour cost, and the gap to the shelf price did not add up. They had 2 to 3 lakh each saved from their jobs, empty bank balances and big dreams. Both had the same nomadic middle-class childhood, moving wherever a father was transferred.
2016A mattress factory, in the year everyone wanted to be the Uber of X. The first version of the orthopaedic memory foam mattress goes out. Roll packing, a technology that already existed globally, arrives in India with them: it cut logistics cost and got customers filming themselves opening the box. The 100-day trial went out early too, and the founders lost sleep over it, because apparel-style returns of 30 to 40 percent would have closed the company.
2016-18Three years and no investor. Nobody had a frame of reference for a D2C brand that owned its manufacturing. Every second or third day an order came in, they phoned a contract manufacturer, and FedEx collected it seven days later. Then assembly, foam from one supplier and fabric from another. Then their own foam. The first factory was on a third floor, so each evening the mattresses were lowered by rope and pulley into the FedEx truck. He calls the drought a blessing in disguise.
2020Sleep becomes home. Customers asked for pillows and bed sheets, then asked why they should buy bed frames anywhere else, and the same factory capability carried Wakefit into furniture. Every expansion is credited to customers rather than to a fundraise.
TodayAbout 3,000 people come to work at Wakefit every day. Eight or nine factories, everything made in India from raw materials sourced worldwide, 8 lakh customers and 18 lakh products sold, roughly ₹450 crore raised against revenue edging toward ₹700 crore. The mattress is on its eighteenth or nineteenth version in an industry that is fifty or sixty years old and still has no certifying body, so the accountability is self-imposed. Twenty-two experience centres opened over eighteen experimental months are being enlarged from about 500 square feet to 3,000. Shop-floor and customer-facing staff hold ESOPs, an idea he traces to reading about Narayana Murthy's driver.
2030sHe expects the ecosystem to look better still. Each generation of founders is more mature than the last, and what he wants for Wakefit by then is to be the box Indians type a home search into, whether or not they buy. His own dichotomy: build a company that outlasts its founders, and stay detached enough to leave the day you stop adding value.
