Beddable: Starting a bedlinen brand

August 14, 2019

I believe that best business ideas are triggered by real, personal frustrations. This is exactly what Joe Ozkanli, the founder and creative director of beddable, was experiencing when looking for a simple way of buying bedding for his new apartment in London, which he shares with his partner. I’m always drawn to such stories because there are many lessons we can all learn from. And so beddable story had to be included in ESTILA and I’m pleased to say that you can now find it in Volume 10. Here’s a small extract from the feature. Get your notepads and pens ready, it’s a great one!

LESSON ONE: FRUSTRATION TO SOLUTION

I started beddable after a frustrating experience trying to buy sheets for our new home. We’d just moved to London and we wanted a simple, clean and masculine aesthetic. Buying bedding just seemed unnecessarily complicated. There was so much marketing jargon and so many technical terms. Some prices were astronomically high, while cheaper products were poor quality. Almost all the bedding we could find seemed to target female customers.

The bedding industry couches itself in those terms, even having product names like the “housewife pillowcase”. There were many more options with floral prints than in simple tones or patterns. It seemed to us that things needed to move on. Sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers were also often sold separately, which made it more expensive and more difficult to match colours and styles.

With beddable, I wanted to simplify things. I wanted to create a one-stop shop where you could buy good quality, matching bundles of products that would fit a modern home, or a loft apartment like ours. And I wanted to create bedding products with some masculine appeal. We did lots of research about different fabrics to strike the balance between quality and price. We found the best producers for each product, which is why we work with suppliers from Portugal, Turkey and Japan as well as the UK.

I’m a one-man show. I source our products and I built and manage the website, partly from our loft apartment in Hoxton. This area of east London has helped inspire the beddable brand, with its industrial heritage and creative spirit.

LESSON TWO: STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE

A simple thing well done is the definition of excellence. That’s what we strive for at beddable. We’re making simple, stylish, high quality bedding and delivering it to our customers quickly and without hassle. We’re aiming to make not only the products but also the whole shopping experience better. Our bundles simplify the process of buying bedding by offering all the elements you need for a luxurious bed in one box. They eliminate the need to traipse around multiple stores.

LESSON THREE: CUSTOMER JOURNEY

We have a programme called “Sleep on it” to help customers who are tempted by our bedding but want to feel the fabric first. We send them two pillowcases which allow them to get a feel for the quality of our products.

There’s a misconception that men don’t care much about interior design, soft furnishings, or coordinating the style of their living space. We believe they do, and we wanted to created bedding that would appeal to them. Many of our customers, who include professional men living a fast-paced urban life just like us, don’t have the time to spend hours researching bedding or comparing thread counts.

We want to make it easier for them to easily find well-designed, good quality and life-enhancing products for their home. We’ve started with bedding, but we plan to expand into other products in the years ahead.

Learn lesson four and five in Volume 10.

Full article first appeared in ESTILA Volume 10.