Home solutions provider Wakefit has seen strong growth in its business during a pandemic-hit year as people spent more time indoors and became comfortable with online shopping, and expects to log Rs 450 crore in revenue in the financial year 2021.
The company, which had started as a sleep solutions provider in March 2016, has also scaled up its manufacturing operations and increased headcount to 2400 people during the fiscal.
“We had started with just mattresses and post that, we expanded into all sleep products, including bed sheets, comforters etc and last year, we expanded into the complete home solutions range. We have been fortunate to grow very fast this financial year, we are on track to hit about Rs 450 crore,” Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, co-founder and Director of Wakefit.co told PTI.
He added that the company had clocked Rs 199 crore in revenue during the financial year 2020 as per audited financials.
“This Rs 450 crore is just in 10 and a half months because April was a complete washout and May, we lost half a month… the pandemic has had a very positive impact on our industry. First, customers were concerned about going to a store and buying, so they moved online for this category,” he said.
Ramalingegowda added that investments in furniture and other home solutions have also gone up as people spent more time at home because of the pandemic.
To meet this surge in demand, the Verlinvest and Sequoia Capital India-backed company has ramped up its manufacturing capacities. The company has seven large factories at present (three each in Bengaluru and Jodhpur, and one in Delhi-NCR), with an additional facility coming up in Delhi-NCR soon.
“We have expanded the manufacturing capacity, and grown the team to sustain growth. We had about 350 employees on staff last year when our overall headcount was close to 600. This year, we have ramped our staff to over 800 people, with a total employee base of close to 2400. The rest of the workforce comprises labourers on our payroll and on a contract basis,” Ramalingegowda said.
Besides, Wakefit has trained more than 600 customer experience executives, 30-40 machine operators and over 100 carpenters in technical knowledge, soft skills and basic computer knowledge depending on their role, and intends to scale these efforts going forward.
At a monthly level, the company gets about 68-70 percent of its revenue from mattresses, about 10 percent from sleep accessories, and the remaining from furniture, which is a relatively new category for Wakefit.
“We do expect this to change, primarily because if you look at the market size, the furniture market size is 15 times bigger than the mattress market size…two or three years down the line, we feel that it is probably going to be 50-50, where the furniture will form 50 percent, and sleep and sleep accessories will form 50 percent,” he added.
Ramalingegowda said pre-pandemic, the revenue contribution from locations beyond the top eight cities used to be about 30-35 percent.
But once the pandemic hit and a lot of people moved back to their hometowns, and even smaller town customers got comfortable buying online, the revenue contribution from Tier II cities went up, he added.
The company also has five experience centres across the country – in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Gurugram and Coimbatore.
