Before I launched Flo in 2018, I spent close to 10 years working at Hush - a B2B supplier of mattresses to many of the country’s leading hotels and resorts. One of the things that would happen fairly often back then was that people who had stayed at one of these nice hotels would call us to say that they had just enjoyed the best night’s sleep on one of our mattresses and wanted to know where they could buy one for their own homes.
Regular encounters like this got me interested in the B2C space. Unfortunately, I soon realised that traditional distribution channels (which involved multiple middlemen) were driving prices up to the point where they were out of reach for most young Indians.
I thought it was ironic that good sleep was just not affordable for most young Indians at a time in their lives when the quality of their sleep could make all the difference.
So while I was thinking about how good sleep could be brought within the reach of more Indian households, I discovered a wave of direct-to-consumer brands, disrupting multiple industries in the West, cutting out middlemen and re-imagining supply chains by leveraging the power of the Internet. I almost instantly knew that a marriage between my knowledge of how to build great quality sleep products and a D2C distribution model via the internet, would allow me to deliver incredibly comfortable sleep solutions at price points that every Indian could afford. And that’s how Flo was born!
