 good morning. So when E4M invited me for this topic to talk about the role of authenticity and transparency it was a very good point that resonated very well with us as a new age D2C company and I'll also talk to you for a second about why this topic is so relevant today. Gone are the days where a company like HUL or BNG could build a brand purely on two things one was distribution and two was marketing dollars. So earlier you could have a product that could barely and I'm not talking about specific companies I'm generally talking about how products are being launched. You could have a product that was barely meeting the norms or the what the customers expected or it could just be an inferior product also but if you have the distribution might that means throughout the country you are present on the shelves of stores because you have such a big company and you're paying for the shelf space that was point number one. Point number two was there are only few limited media opportunities there was television there was print and there was radio and to access those you needed crores and crores of rupees so both of those could enable anybody to build a brand if you if those two enable us with it but today that is just not possible that is primarily because customers now can access these products without this distribution might through multiple offline channels and multiple online channels including Amazon, Flipkart and so forth and secondly the marketing dollars required to launch something has completely changed you can now start with a 500 rupees per day marketing budget and then learn and figure out things that work for your brand so given these two and the third important point being customers now cannot be silenced back then if it was an inferior product so what the trials would suffer sampling would suffer but if you continue to be on the shelf some market share today it is next to impossible to do that customers will go and shout out on social media that this is what I liked this is what I did not like just look at what Novel just now said he was kind enough not to name the brand but he was very clear that he did not like how the company treated him and his wife so that is something that will kill a brand overnight so given these three changes authenticity and transparency are the two pillars that you cannot buy money and that's why I feel this presentation should be viewed through that lens quick two minute introduction about us Ankit and I are the new co-founders we started about seven and a half eight years ago we started being a pure mattress company expanded into 2016 when we started we started with only mattresses as our core products Ankit is brilliant with consumer understanding what they like what is the specification what is the chemistry of materials and then creating products that are affordable and I invest a lot of my time on this demand set how do you market products how do you build out a story for the public how do you respond and deal with every touch point with the consumer once we started with mattresses slowly expanded into accessories which means pillows bedsheets and so forth so we became a sleep company and within about three four years we expanded into home solutions which is a glamorous way of saying that we are also a furniture company so we now have sofas wardrobes website tables anything that you need in your home we now do that and we in 2022 last year we opened India's largest furniture factory there's a small AV clip down the line which will tell you why we did that and how big it is and the last part is today we now have about 40 retail stores again going back to authenticity and credibility you need to be where the consumers are and for us that turned out to be ebos exclusive brand outlets that company owns and operates from what we learned from our own personal experience I wouldn't go so far as to call this a framework or advice but let me put it this way that this is what we have learned in our seven and a half years the pillars for trust and transparency are product which means what is the product that you're delivering to your customers homes the customers who are they why are they to be targeted how are they to be targeted and how can you add value to their lives and gone are the days where you could just do a demographic profile of customers and say income level city level age gender that era is dead today you need to do a lot more about psychographic profiling irrespective of their age and demographic and city how are they behaving where are they consuming data to say that this is a credible brand how do they make decisions where do they research who do they ask who influences the decision of their mind so understanding the customers psychographic profile and then catering to that is another very important pillar community is going beyond customers can you get a bunch of completely unknown strangers to become your evangelists your advocates because they could be your customers they could be the media they could be your suppliers they could be your vendors they could be your employees but can you build a community of people that are going to talk about you and talk about in a positive way even when you are not in the room and people for us this is about our own team members wake fitters we have about 1500 full-time employees and other thousand contractors we we now have about 40 experience centers six factories 16 warehouses it's a large problem but how do you ensure that for them wake fitters not just a place where they get a paycheck it is something more than it how can they think of us as a team that they would do anything for that's the people but and lastly category in a country like India where we are going to constantly max out the available audience you need to be able to constantly grow the category if the category doesn't grow and you are not doing the job as a market leader to grow that you are both also tapers so I'd like to cover these aspects so this is about product even seven eight years ago you would have seen or heard or somebody in a family telling that oh my god loan by home mattresses because you sleep on it you're going to get it it's not good for your back it's the quality it doesn't last as long as cotton all of that that is because this whole industry was right with a lot of attenuation manufacturers would add something on a spills that fill up the foam space but ultimately it is not genuine good quality foam with the right density so that would make you first of all feel a lot of heat when you lay down because your body heat would react with that and then that reaction would take care in that material second it would not not last long if and those are the days where they would not give you long warranty so these products would not last more than two three four years or so and then you yourself would throw it away because it is for quality but for us we were never right from day one a trader saying buy from somebody and sell it to consumers we were always a full-stack company which means do your own RIT do your own production do your own delivery do your own installation so this gives us tremendous control across the value chain on how to control costs and pass it on to the consumers and secondly how do you ensure that the customers know that what they're getting is 100% pure because we do it in our factory we know that there's no adulterants added there's no fillers added because we buy the wood for our furniture we know how much pains we go through to go to the forest auction forest department auctions buy the wood in ethical manner treat it in Rajasthan which is a right climate to treat wood then bring it to Bangalore to make furniture out of it so every single part of the value chain if you own you can without doubt explain to your consumers that hey this is a pure product that you're buying and we stand behind it if you have any problem we are there for you today's consumers are much much much more than willing to forgive you for a mistake but they're not going to be forgiving you for shulking your responsibilities if you say that hey this batch was screwed up no point I will take it back give you an alternative product they will forgive you in a minute I can give you thousands of such cases but if you say no this is not my responsibility or see this fine print in my terms and conditions that this policy does not exist so I'm not doing it so go ahead and suffer through the pain of owning this product that is when you're shulking your responsibility so that's why for us this full manufacturing transparency was very very important because the more people know we created multiple videos around how the form is tested the form is tested for 80 there's something on as a pounding test so in our factory in the lab every sample of form that comes out goes through that 80,000 pounding so there's a cylinder of a certain height in which pounds that form for about 80,000 times and the end of the 80,000 times we're going to measure the firmness once more if the firmness has deteriorated then that's a bad bad similarly there is something known as humidity and temperature testing so the form is put into that chamber and then tested why do you have to do this because India has many countries within one country you have Rajasthan which is super dry and hot you have Jammu Kashmir which is super cold you have Chennai and Mumbai which are very very hot and humid and the quality of the product should remain the same for 10 years 15 years when we give that warranty so to do that we are able to test and then do that so when we did videos and we got people talking about it when we got journalists to visit our factory and then create stories around it it was much much more trusted than what we would have just say so yes we throughout this journey we've also spoken about specific other brands which have done brilliantly because we don't want to just keep giving make-fit examples so whole truth did a brilliant job I don't know if you're aware of it this is a food company and they were earlier known as and nothing more because they're from the Genesis they were a purpose-led brand and they said that there are a lot of adulterants a lot of preservatives a lot of non-food items going in your food so they said we'll be very honest and ethical with what we put in secondly we're going to be honest with what we display on the packaging so that you don't have to worry about what fine print is there what is not there and we'll take care that you only eat genuine food so that whole purpose-led thing was very much strong even today and we hear that a lot of lawsuits are also being filed by current incumbents who want to continue to do that so when you are purpose-led I think that is where people will stand by you and customers will continue to support it could you please the AV please this is a five minute AV but I'll only stop at about a minute minute and a half this is the furniture factory it's about 50 kilometers to enable people who create beautiful and this can only happen if we have a very smart fact can you be able to deliver a product yeah so this is this is the factory that I was telling you it is a spread over six lakh square feet to give you a sense that's about 14 acres and we realize that the only way to manufacture the product in an ethical transparent manner is to do all of those in the right hold you earlier so we realize that in India there was absolutely no automated manufacturing and which will bring down the cost can you see those robotic arms so the whole furniture from the raw material all the way to coming out as packaged is done by robotic arms and automated conveyor belts and this enables us to bring down the cost of production from a typical 22-23% of a selling price to about 7% of the selling price so what do we do with this we pass it on to consumers that's why if you go to our website and check out our products they are about 30% 25% cheaper than any large brand that you might see in India so this dream that we had and has always been is that can we democratize access to great products at an affordable price point so that is the genesis of this factory and we've continued to source continued to produce and then ship it and deliver to consumers homes we've gone to the crazy level of having we are today probably the largest employer of carpenters in India even more than urban company because we realize that people weren't trained to go and install products so we created WingFit Gurukul and then got them trained and they now go to consumers homes and then install second is customers the second pillar and here we realize that no matter how much we are as a brand are going to speak people are always going to believe other people like them so that's why if you interview consumers you will see that nearly 50-60% of our consumers have either heard about us through family or friends or they've seen a verified Amazon review by the way we have about seven lakh reviews across Amazon, Flipkart, Facebook, Google largest in India in this industry largest and this is not something that somebody by throwing money can capture because this has taken us eight years to get there we've serviced about two million customers which is 20 lakh people a small drop in the ocean and long way to go but this is we realize if people are going to be talking about their stories and how WingFit help then others will believe it so we said we have to make unfiltered unscripted real conversations we said it's not going to be about a snazzy video and great supers and really really good graphics that's not what we intended to do we said we're going to just talk about the real stories of real customers you will see people talking about how one of their one of their partners is a pilot and so they have very regular sleep so they were looking for a product that would enable them to sleep very well and so they looked they researched these were the things that they compared and then they purchased and then they loved using them another lady talks about how during her pregnancy she used to get back pains and she constantly was looking for a product that worked well and because of the pandemic if my memory is right her parents were also here and she's jokingly says that after a while I got this week that matters but after a while my dad and I were both trying to outplay each other and who was going to get to sleep on the week that matters so real people real stories people with arthritis people with back pain people with sleep issues people who couldn't afford a dining table earlier people who couldn't even fathom how an L shape sofa sectional sofa could be available for 25,000 rupees when the whole world is allocated 50,000 and then they loved it then they needed it for a specific purpose and it is a story behind that it's not a statistic it's a person it's a human and that is what we spent a lot of time in putting together and these stories have garnered lakhs and lakhs of views because it is so real we didn't want to make it like a film again on this no better example than amazon we really really look up to them I don't know how many of you have a seller account on amazon I don't know how many of you must have been consumers on amazon if you have a problem and you call the call center you you will not see that kind of ownership anywhere else and I'm not talking about blindly saying haa refund karthenge ma'am it is about total ownership they will actually say hold on I'm going to find this this is the data that we have this is what you can do this is the department you can contact this is the phone number that you can give and this is a normal employee it is not somebody who has huge e-sobs or they're a vp in amazon they're a normal employee but the mission that each of them believes in that if a customer has called me and I have to solve it that is really really admirable even at this size so what I told you big fit stories happy home stories was about that how our products have changed people's homes and made them from houses to homes that was what the story was the community I told you about how to get people to talk many of you may have may not have heard three years ago we created this property called sleep internship and we kept seeing in the newspaper and media about how some business man was super successful but because he was just working 20 hours a day how the prime minister Modi barely slept and that's why he's the leader of India so he said this is not going to work if you look at any any person who's at the forefront of innovation or physical capabilities in their field look at lebron james look at roger federal look at oprah men free ariana ficton they are at the forefront of what they are doing in their creative or physical field and all of them prioritize sleep they say nine ten hours is what I need for me to recover and function at my best so if sleep is the small trick that can open that superhuman power how do we get people to talk about it and how do we do it in a fun way that is not preaching so we came up with this idea called sleep internship and we said we are going to go around the country and choose people who are passionate about sleep over netflix over their boss over their partner over their kid and they prioritize and value their sleep and we ran this campaign and every year we've got first year was about 1.6 lakh applications second year was about five lakhs third year was another five lakhs and we chose these people we gave them our products and sleep trackers for free their data was not used by us this was not a quiet way to pull data for rnd this was purely to talk about this concept and what we did was get them to post on their social and on our own sleep internship website so that people could actually see their stories of transformation and I can see a lady yawning but I was just that's exactly what we want to try and say that it's okay to sacrifice a conference to sleep in a little bit it's okay to prioritize sleep because you are actually a different person you are actually a better person you are more creative in your work you're more patient with your irritable kid you're much much more sorted in your thoughts and you won't believe it sleep is not just rest sleep is a thousand other things that you have not aware at all to take an extreme case people who have gone through physical and sexual abuse and they when they have really good quality sleep they're able to process those emotions much deeper much faster and forget the traumatic parts and move on with their life much faster than those who suffered but couldn't sleep so so research has shown that long-term memory short-term memory rest recovery everything is possible if you just have good sleep so we wanted to prioritize that and every year we've chosen these sleep interns given them each one lakh rupees given them our products and all we've requested is you talk about it you be evangelist about how this has helped you that is the power of community it's a it's a flagship property people love it every year people wait for it when they apply and contact us similarly nika you must have all seen they've created something known as the nika army where they have not just said that we work with influencers in a very tactical manner they have said we create people who are really strong evangelists and during our say for example hot pink sale we will get them to talk about the topics of the sale why they should buy how they can use in tier two towns these people even go and run workshops in those nika stores and people are invited to attend for free and whatever products are there as samples displayed during the product can buy this is driving sampling adoption they get brands to partner with them to do that because they're a marketplace so it is going beyond a very tactical engagement with influencers and saying that I'll create a community of people who are passionate about nika and its products so similarly we have done the sleep internship we've done the joe which is joy of missing out just like everybody talks about fear of missing out we said we have to create something called joy of missing out and this has become a newsletter that has been subscribed by thousands and thousands of people and the idea is it's okay to chill it's okay to take a bit of downtime it's okay to get your center back and this has resonated a lot and even the podcast of joe mo has picked up very very well investing in our people if our team members are not happy and we are not living that purpose then it's all offwash I'm just doing it for PR so we said how do we do it for our own team members so when we came back from the pandemic and everybody was requested to come back to office two days three days a week we realized that lot of them missed their afternoon naps they would get these 15 20 minutes time before the kids came back home or before the craziness of the second half of the day started immediately after lunch just take a small breather and when they came back to work it was a big change suddenly after one and a half years of the pandemic so we said we created this campaign called though said hi so we said in our own company we would ensure that h i would blocked out 2 to 230 even to this day it is live on my calendar also 2 to 230 no meetings can be set up and our team members are free to do whatever they want you won't believe the results some of them go out for a walk some of them listen to music some of them meditate some of them put their head down on their desk and go to sleep some of them go out for a smoke which is not so good but but they find what they want to do and recenter themselves for the second half of the day and and secondly we created something known as I don't know if you're aware we created no questions asked 100 day return policy for our mattresses nqa no questions asked so similarly we realized that lot of people men women various reasons are not comfortable putting in that box in the leave application form saying reason for leave sometimes it's very clear right it's a wedding my kids school passport appointment very clear you put it there but sometimes you don't want to share it you're you're having period cramps you're having a low feeling depressed that day you just had a crazy last week and you just want to down time just want to watch movies at home you don't want to put that there so we said we'll create a separate category of leaves called nqa wellness thing no questions asked so for if you if an employee goes to our hrms and chooses that category they do not have to enter the leave box the reason box and they can just go apply and it's auto approved so that is a simple thing that we did you must have already seen dream 11 raise a pay again investing a lot in their employees i think last 30 seconds do i have time for another one minute or so yeah so the last thing is category i told you that if you're a market leader you're always at risk that category itself is not growing so you have to do the job of growing the category so we created something known as the great Indian sleep scorecard for the last six years we have been collecting and publishing sleep patterns and trends of indians we are the largest repository in india of sleep pattern data for indians i think between these six years or so we have about two and a half lakh respondents sharing their sleep patterns what wakes them up what do they do before bedtime how many times they might wake up what happens to men versus women for example we constantly find out that women sleep less than men they're slightly later to bed than their male counterparts and slightly earlier to wake up than their male counterparts no matter what hashtag share the load you do women are still sacrificing more of their sleep similarly we find that bombay sleeps much less than say character um similarly we find that the year that geo was launched people moved from saying the reason for staying up at night for social media to saying that we now are awake because we are watching and consuming content on what it is so data became cheaper so just see how external factors are constantly impacting our sleep and when we publish this every year you wake world sleep day in march is when we publish this and journalists wait for it and every year they follow up because they are now the most credible trusted source and when we use this data in social media in our content pieces in how we communicate the story of our products to the consumers how we innovate for our products how we democratize access to the products all of this then say feels that okay they're not doing it just for PR they really mean it they're looking for their employees they're doing it for their customers suppliers they're also doing it to broadly educate the consumer so I think that's the mission that we had and that's what we've always done just a final slide last year we ended at about 825 crore in revenue this year we are chasing 1100 crore target the idea is to not chase a revenue number not chase a size number the idea is to become India's most loved home and sleep company and we have built followers not one follower has been bought we don't care about buying 2 million customer service 7 lakh reviews and our dream is to continue to build something that survives beyond Ankit and me if there is a company that survives beyond us I think that's the ultimate dream so thank you for having me if there is time we can take one question or two questions or we can wrap it up as per thank you