- Linenandhomes.com was founded by Shelly and her husband.
- They bootstrapped the business, focusing on high-quality products to drive growth.
- They’ve expanded their product line, sales channels, and offline presence.
I recently had a chat with Shelly, one of the founders of Linenandhomes.com, a D2C ecommerce brand for sleep-related products.
Shelly is originally from the US but moved to the Philippines with her husband who is from there. They wanted to start a business and saw the explosive growth that Lazada and Shopee were having at the time, so they decided to jump into the game.
The Early Days
At the time when they started in 2017 not many people in Philippines knew about the benefits of ‘bamboo bedding’, which apparently is a pretty popular thing now. So they needed to do a lot of consumer education at the outset.
They would educate on their blog, via social posts, etc. Plus they would participate in offline events. It was slowing going.
But gradually as in the west… people began to learn of its advantages and business started to pickup. And word of mouth started to become a very powerful customer acquisition channel for them.
Which was aided by the quality of their products.
Shelly mentioned they would design the products themselves and then source them from various suppliers who produced them. So they were biting off a pretty big part of the value chain despite being a bootstrapped company.
A Family Team
During the early days it was just she and her husband. Her husband came from finance and so he took care of things like accounting whereas she took care of marketing and the offline channels.
I asked if they had any interest in taking on investment or perhaps allowing an ‘aggregator’ to buy a major stake in them. And she said they’d entertained the idea and had spoke with one such aggregator, but decided against it.
For them it is a very personal business and they feel a very strong responsibility towards their customers, many of whom are repeat buyers for a long time.
Where things are now
In recent years they’ve expanded beyond bedding into many other sleep-related products like sleepwear.
They have also grown their sales channels. They now sell on marketplaces in addition to their own site.
And they’ve expanded their offline presence. They sell their products in department stores and have even opened up their own showroom.
It sounds like they are growing very healthy and see lots of potential for even further growth as they pursue their vision of “creating a simpler way to bring more comfort to families through better sleep.”
A couple closing thoughts
One thing I took away from our chat was just how far D2C eCommerce has evolved in SE Asia. I remember when I was in Lazada back in 2014-17 these types of companies didn’t seem to exist almost at all.
It was just imported, well-known international brands, or it was cheap, poorly made products from places like China.
Now you see companies like Shelly’s really blasting off with high quality products and brands that were born here in SE Asia. And its a great thing to see having seen where e-Commerce was in the region back when I first started at Lazada in 2014.
