We are excited to invest in Wakefit.co as it continues its journey towards becoming the market-leading sleep solutions and home decor omnichannel brand,” said Varun Laul, Partner at Investcorp PE, when the firm led Wakefit’s ₹320 crore Series D funding round in January 2023.
Mattresses were never considered an aspirational purchase. People happily spend big on sofas and furniture while setting up a home, but a mattress? Barely a second thought. So why did a global private equity firm want to invest in a company that sells something nobody gets excited about? That’s exactly what this blog will unpack — the problem Wakefit set out to solve, the decision that shaped their strategy, how they executed it, the results it produced, and the lesson every small business can take from it.
The Problem
The mattress market was dominated by a few companies — but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that these companies weren’t customer-friendly. While shopping for a mattress, customers faced several frustrations:
(1) Awkward testing environment — In an offline store, customers get only 5–10 minutes to test a mattress, which isn’t enough time to know if it’s actually comfortable. On top of that, you have to lie down on a plastic-wrapped mattress, fully clothed, under bright lights, while a salesperson and other shoppers watch — making the whole process awkward and uncomfortable.
(2) Heavy middleman markup — In most stores, salesmen earn commission on what they sell, so they push expensive mattresses or unnecessary add-ons. They also create false urgency — ‘today-only offers’ — leaving customers no time to think it through
(3) Inflated prices — Stores often mark up prices artificially, then offer a ‘50% discount’ just to bring it back to a normal rate. Worse, the sticker price isn’t the final price — customers still pay hidden charges like delivery, installation, and old mattress removal, which disrupts their actual budget.
(4) Rigid return or exchange policy — Returning a mattress is difficult, and even if you succeed, you still pay a 20–30% restocking or delivery fee. Many stores don’t offer cash refunds at all — if the mattress doesn’t work out, you only get a one-time exchange for another model in their store, effectively trapping your money
Because of these problems, customers didn’t trust mattress companies — they feared wasting their money on a purchase they couldn’t properly evaluate or return.
The Decision
When Ankit (Wakefit’s founder) entered the market and saw these problems, he tried to fix them by converting people’s fear into trust. However, gaining customer trust was the biggest challenge.
In a 2019 interview with YourStory, Chaitanya (Wakefit’s co-founder) explained: ‘We wanted to prove to them that they could safely spend their money and be assured of a cutting-edge product and a dependable service team that is always available. Hence, a lot of our efforts went into educating them on the science of sleep and how the product has been innovated from the ground up.
Instead of matching competitors on advertising spend or discounts, Wakefit decided to win over customers by educating them first.
The Execution
(1) The 100-Night Free Trial
Wakefit turned the customer’s most uncomfortable experience into their biggest strength: the trial period. Wakefit offers a 100-night free trial. In this trial, a customer can buy a Wakefit mattress, try it for 100 nights, and if they don’t like it, return it for a 100% refund — no questions asked. This also solves the return problem as well, since you don’t have to pay restocking fees, solving not one but two problems.
(2) Transparent D2C Pricing
Wakefit cut out the middleman and sold directly to customers, so the prices of their mattresses are cheaper compared to offline stores. For example, the starting price of a queen-size and king-size mattress on Wakefit’s online store is ₹11,000–₹12,000, whereas in offline stores, the same price range can be ₹16,000–₹18,000. Customers also don’t have to pay middlemen charges when buying a product directly from Wakefit — standard delivery and basic installation/assembly are free across most locations in India.
(3) Direct Customer Feedback Loop
One of the main reasons Wakefit became popular is because they listen to customers and understand their pain. In the early days, the founders themselves delivered mattresses to customers personally, and they spoke with each customer, understood their pain points, and made their product better. This move actually improved the company’s reputation — founders personally understanding their customers, whereas other salespersons don’t have any knowledge about the product and aren’t in touch with customers. As a result, in 2017, purely through word of mouth, Wakefit earned ₹6 crore in revenue.
(4) Educational Blog Content
Beyond fixing pricing and trust issues, Wakefit also built a blog that didn’t just talk about their products — it answered real health questions people were already searching for, like “Which is the best mattress for back pain?” and “How can an orthopedic mattress help with back pain?” Instead of selling mattresses directly, they positioned themselves as a source of genuine sleep-health information. This educate-first approach meant that by the time a reader was ready to buy, Wakefit had already earned their trust.
(5) The Sleep Internship
A marketing campaign that generated lots of eyeballs for Wakefit was the Sleep Internship. The Wakefit Sleep Internship is a remote program where selected candidates get paid to test out a mattress. In this internship, candidates have to sleep 8–9 hours on a complimentary Wakefit mattress for 100 days while tracking sleep metrics provided on a smart device. What’s more interesting is that participants who completed the tracking cycle earned ₹1 lakh, and the top-performing “sleep champions” could win up to ₹10 lakh.
By offering a dream-like job, the brand generated massive organic PR, social media buzz, and thousands of applications — without relying on a traditional advertising budget. It’s a creative example of spending less money on an unplanned campaign; invest less on creative campaigns like the Sleep Internship.
The Result
These efforts didn’t just build trust in theory — they translated into real, measurable growth.
(1) Traffic & Search Ranking
Wakefit’s informative blogs play an important role in the promotion of the brand, as they generate value and traffic. For example, Wakefit’s blog selected for back pain generates 170,800 organic traffic. Through these blogs, Wakefit’s organic visibility increased significantly. Wakefit gets 2,600,000 monthly visitors, out of which 1,800,000 are unique visitors. Wakefit ranks No. 1 on keywords like “mattress” and “mattress” (misspelled), showing the strength of the brand’s keyword research.
(2) Revenue & Business Growth
Through their consumer-focused decisions, Wakefit saw exponential revenue growth. In 2018, the company’s growth increased by 350%; in 2019, it increased by 200%; and it further increased by 147% in 2020. The company never went downhill after that — even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses were facing losses, Wakefit managed to remain profitable and expand into other tier cities like Mysore, Surat, and Kanpur.
Wakefit didn’t stop at online success. In 2022, the brand made the leap into offline retail, opening its first physical stores in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Lucknow. This expansion grew rapidly — by 2024, Wakefit had crossed 100 offline stores across 40 cities, and the company entered the ₹1,000 crore revenue club, returning to profitability. Wakefit later went public with an IPO that raised ₹1,289 crore, and as of late 2025, the brand operates 125 offline outlets across 62 cities — proving that a brand built on trust and content could scale into physical retail too, without abandoning the strategy that got it there.
(3) Customer Trust Indicators
Perhaps the clearest proof that Wakefit’s trust-first strategy worked is in how customers responded. The brand has served over 8 lakh customers across 19,000 pin codes in India and garnered over 3 lakh positive reviews online. What started as a company fighting customer skepticism became one customer actively vouched for — the same trust problem that once made people hesitant to buy a mattress online became Wakefit’s biggest strength.
The Lesson
Wakefit’s story proves that you don’t need the biggest budget to win a market — you need to solve your customers’ real problems better than anyone else. They didn’t outspend Sleepwell or Duroflex; they out-trusted them.
Through this blog, here are the lessons a small business can take from Wakefit’s playbook:
- Innovation in your service or product is necessary, even if you’re not a big brand. If your product or service isn’t evolving, customers will shift to whoever does. Wakefit’s 100-night trial and transparent pricing weren’t flashy — they were direct answers to real customer frustrations.
- Customers are important — understand their feedback. Learn about your customers’ problems and solve them. If you maintain a good relationship with your customers, you’ll build a loyal audience that promotes your brand through word of mouth.
- Be creative instead of spending a lot of money on an unplanned campaign. Invest less in creative, high-impact campaigns like Wakefit’s Sleep Internship rather than pouring money into generic, unplanned advertising.
If there’s one thing every small business can borrow from Wakefit, it’s this: trust isn’t bought with a bigger budget — it’s earned by consistently proving to your customers that you understand them better than anyone else.