Mattress maker Sheela Foam's high growth in an underpenetrated market has pushed Rahul Gautam, the chairman and managing director, up the rankings of the Forbes Billionaire's list
Rahul Gautam, chairman and managing director of mattress-maker Sheela Foam, best known for its Sleepwell brand, recounts how his late mother started the business back in 1971. She was 39 at the time, widowed and had two young teens, including Gautam, to care for. “She had been a housewife up until then and it would have been the order of the day to remain one,” says the 69-year-old. But she was determined to reverse her misfortune. The army rehabilitation plan enabled her to obtain a licence or permit to do business—the Licence Raj prevailed, and her husband had been a devoted army man. She took it even though she had no business connects or capital.
She found a financial partner and with some help from her father, a diplomat, she established Sheela Foam, her namesake, to manufacture foam. From a single, humble factory in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad, the business has grown to become a market leader with enormous brand recall, deep distribution and financial results to boot: Revenue from operations stood at ₹1,690 crore in FY21 compared to ₹1,755 crore in FY20 on account of Covid-related disruptions, while profit after tax increased to ₹181 crore from ₹166 crore during the same period.
Gautam, who was 15 years old when his father passed away, went on to study chemical engineering at IIT-Kanpur and topped it with a master’s degree in the same area from the US, before joining the business in the early ’80s and steering its fortunes through liberalisation in the 1990s. The listed entity has not only generated enormous wealth for investors—the stock rose by 60 percent in one year—but also for Gautam, who is ranked 1,645 on the 2022 Forbes World’s Billionaires List with a net worth of $1.8 billion, up from rank 2,524 in 2021.
“Even after my mother obtained the licence, business was slow… there were lots of hurdles and setbacks. It would have been easy to sell the licence for ₹1 lakh to ₹2 lakh at that time and enjoy life. But we chose not to. That decision to hold on, and not sell off, I would say, was an early turning point for us,” recalls Gautam. Dressed in a crisp white shirt, he is dignified and articulate—a nod, perhaps, to his army upbringing.
From the outset, Sheela Foam was relentlessly focussed on creating super quality products, says Gautam. In the mid-1990s, it launched the Sleepwell brand of mattresses. Because they used in-house formulations of foam—unlike other brands that purchased it from third-party vendors—the mattresses stood out, says Gautam.