Q Please tell us about your journey in the Indian mattress industry?
Eastern Mattresses Pvt Limited (EMPL) restricted its business footprint to only Kerala for almost 15 years. The company registered a turnover of Rs. 50 Crores during 2014-15 with considerable brand equity across Kerala. We have Coir intensive product portfolio manufactured at our Thodupuzha (Kerala) and Hosur (TN) plants
Q What are the opportunities and challenges, when it comes to dealing with premium mattress in India?
Marketing premium mattresses is a huge opportunity in India. Post Covid, consumers are willing to spend on a good quality mattress. However, the challenges to market premium mattresses are many. Mattress is a low involvement and low engagement category. The majority of mattress outlets do not offer a great user experience to improve the perception of premium mattresses. Mattress sellers lack the techno-commercial skills to explain the features, benefits and advantages of mattresses and recommend an ideal mattress to consumers. False claims and warranties with heavy discounts confuse consumers who intend to buy premium mattresses.
Q What is your contribution to the sustainability project of your company?
60 percent of our product portfolio is built around rubberised coir cores. Coir Mattress would be less worry for land fill visà-vis another type of polymer-based core mattresses. We are also using PET recycled fabrics for a few product varieties. We also offer coir waste and dust before latex compound spray to the neighbouring farmers for their soil productivity enhancement, free of cost.
Q How do you plan to support the Mattress Circular Journey (MCJ)?
We are happy to collaborate with ISPF or any mattress recycling programs. We are willing to support any chemical manufacturing company that wishes to set up a PU Foam recycling plant to extract Polyol. We also wish to reduce the usage of packaging materials like PVC/PP, if any alternative green packaging solutions are offered to us. We are open to increasing the consumption of natural green fibre-based fabrics for many product variants. We don’t use a single grain of EPE in our entire mattress portfolio.