India, March 22 -- For Gaurav Zatakia, venturing into the B2C mattress and sleep essentials market was anything but a smooth transition. Having spent nearly a decade building Hush, a premium B2B mattress brand supplying leading hotel chains like Taj, Marriott, and Hyatt, he had firsthand experience with the industry's inefficiencies. When he tried expanding Hush into the B2C market through traditional retail channels, he faced significant roadblocks-retailers demanded profit margins exceeding 40%, making high-quality mattresses too expensive for most Indian consumers.

Zatakia saw a broken supply chain and realised that the only way to fix it was by cutting out intermediaries and reimagining the distribution process. Around the same time,...