The founders might be late to the game, but Peps has grown steadily to become the biggest spring mattress brand in the country by lording over South Indian markets. Now, the company wants to step out of its regional bastion
(From Left to Right) Mr. P Manjunath - Director, Mr. K Madhavan - Managing Director, Mr. G Shankar Ram, Joint Managing Director, Peps Industries
The sleep merchant started experiencing sleepless nights. K Madhavan, who joined mattress company Kurl-on in 1977, was afflicted with a sleep disorder. Madhavan was 55. The unease had nothing to do with his professional career. Madhavan was president (operations) at Kurl-on, one of the top players in the coir mattress segment. The anxiety, it seems, had sprung from an opportunity that his 46-year-old friends—P Manjunath and G Shankar Ram—had spotted in a discarded factory in Coimbatore. The unit, which had the capability to manufacture spring mattresses, was on the block. Madhavan knew they had stumbled upon something big. The three friends, subsequently, sprang into action.
Madhavan, the oldest among the trio, looked at the bright side first. The biggest advantage, he reasoned with his friends, was that the spring mattress segment was a virgin area. There was only one small player in India, as the industry was dominated by foam and coir mattresses. The global dynamics too pointed at the massive headroom. Around 77 percent of the sleeping material across the globe is nothing but spring mattresses. Spring, the gang thought, could disrupt the sleep market dominated by the giants like Sleepwell and Kurl-on. The second biggest plus was Madhavan’s career experience of around three decades with Kurl-on. The third positive was the curtailed geographical aspirations of the soon-to-be-formed team of entrepreneurs. All three wanted to experiment in South India.
The only flip side to the adventurous plan appeared to be age of the founders, well past that of the poster boys of entrepreneurship that lunge out from magazine covers. What they sure had, though, was a spring in their step. The trio firmed up their plans, bought the local manufacturing unit, tied up with one of the top spring mattress companies in the US, Restonic Corporation, and started Peps. “We wanted an attractive name, something that people could remember and recall quickly,” Madhavan says. There were two more lines of thoughts behind the nomenclature. First, the name should not reflect the nature of the product. Second, it should arouse curiosity.
Almost 15 years later, Peps has found a new meaning. “It is a perfect explanation for peaceful sleep,” says Madhavan, bursting into laughter, letting on that Peps did indeed free him of his sleep disorder. It’s done other things too, including growing from Rs4.80 crore in revenue in the first year (FY07) to Rs478 crore by FY20. Along the way, Peps has also become the biggest spring mattresses brand in India, selling over 3 lakh mattresses every year; it is now planning to step up its game by expanding into western markets. The company that gets 80 percent of its sales from south India–90 percent of it from offline channels – managed to hold its own in FY21 and expects to close the year with a top line of just under Rs 450 crore.