A sweet sleep is for sale, not dreams

Bedding products entrepreneur Motokuni Takaoka reckons that the key thing in the consumer business is to make customers feel the product so they’ll come back. He talks to

Motokuni Takaoka c o u l d n’ t h a v e imagined wading into an industry that has hardly any relevance to a business he was to inherit.

He founded Nukata-gun, Japan-based airweave inc a decade ago from a company that used to be his uncle’s firm making fishing net machines, and turned it into one that now boasts producing a wide range of fancy bedding products, including mattresses with price tags of up to 12,000 yuan on the Chinese mainland.

What he discovered was that the plastic resins used in the production of fishing lines could be used for making mattresses as well.

“The company was born with a desire to do things differently. We make mattresses using very different technology compared to other companies,” says Takaoka, airweave’s chairman and chief executive officer.

Everybody knows the bedding business is one that’s very hard for newcomers to dig their hands into, he points out, but airweave did manage to rake in annual sales of more than $100 million for several years in Japan alone.

For 2016, the company’ revenue in Japan is projected to hit $130 million — up 18 percent on the previous year.

People should realize, Takaoka says, that although bedding products are consumer oriented, they’re very unique. Normally, people would buy consumer products and then try them out and, if they like them, they would return.

“But, for bedding products, if you go to a bedding shop, you may have already decided to buy something, otherwise you wouldn’t go there. So, people would usually get the feel of two or three products and if they find the price is fine, they’ll buy them.”

Then, the consumer will have the product home delivered and sleep on it. Only then can they understand its value. And, since people can’t sleep on the mattresses at a store, they won’t have the chance to know other products, Takaoka asserts.

Like most aspiring enterprises, airweave isn’t prepared