Inside At-Home Coffee Brand Sleepy Owl Coffee's ₹100 Cr Growth Journey
In a nation like India that loves
, drinking tea is a natural, everyday practice. But drinking coffee is often an out-of-home occasion, evokes deep conversations and sometimes leads to business ideas that fructify into cult offerings.
For Arman Sood, Ashwajeet Singh and Ajai Thandi, founders of the new-age coffee brand Sleepy Owl, the last one came true. Driven by their passion for the perfect brew, they left their corporate jobs and started crafting great-tasting coffees with custom flavours, designed for home consumption.
Set up in 2016, the Delhi-based challenger brand started production with a ready to drink, Cold Brew Box. Today, the VC-funded startup offers a diverse range that covers cold brew packets and hot brew bags, instant coffee, cold coffee cans, South Indian filter coffee, ground coffee varieties, coffee merchandise and recently launched protein Coffee (Profee) and RTD Matcha variants. About 55% of their revenue comes from dry coffee powder and the remaining 45% from other coffee-based beverages.
Sleepy Owl coffee is available in more than 15K retail stores, online marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart, quick commerce platforms like Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, and its D2C website.
Before launching Sleepy Owl Coffee, Sood and Singh were hostel roommates, ran an ecommerce venture for some time and finished their law studies. Soon, Singh left his job and joined Sood in Mumbai, where they brainstormed startup ideas. Thandi, a friend of Singh and an investment banker, worked in New York then. Interestingly, all three were passionate about good coffee, but coffee chains like Starbucks were (and still are) too expensive.
Making an amazing cup of coffee at home was not easy, either. The readily available instant coffee brands lacked variety, and those looking for exotic brews spent a lot on beans and appliances. The trio saw the gap in the market and launched a wide variety of home brews, minus costly and complicated brewing setups.
But building a product-based startup based on the tenets of craft coffee was not a small task. The founders had to compete with legacy players, and the concept of startups as disruptors was still emerging. So, Sleepy Owl had to rise to prominence in three critical areas to cater to countless coffee enthusiasts across India.
Creating new coffee categories:
“India is on the verge of a consumer explosion, and people are eager to try new brands and products. But coffee has not evolved much over the decades, given the dominance of tea drinkers, except in southern India,” said Thandi.More importantly, the existing market was crowded, with brands like Nescafé (parent company is Nestlé), Bru (owned by Hindustan Unilever) and Tata Coffee calling the shots. Therefore, a new coffee brand offering familiar flavours would not be a cause for commotion.
Sleepy Owl created new categories to stand out, starting with an FSSAI-certified cold brew that had zero demand in India a decade ago. For context, a cold brew is all about steeping coarsely ground coffee beans in normal-to-cold water for an extended period (12-24 hours), which gives it a smooth, less acidic taste. However, educating customers about cold brew and the difference between instant and ground coffee was challenging.
“Many people were not familiar with cold brew. Hence, we did everything we could to help them understand the concept. We called our friends, did door-to-door campaigns and offered samples at food events. Gradually, our first 1K customers became our brand ambassadors and helped us grow,” explained Thandi.
It has an R&D team for product development, and all its coffees are carefully roasted in-house and in small batches to produce the right flavours. It also collaborates with external labs and experts to maintain the same quality standards for complex concoctions and does not use artificial flavours or preservatives. The startup’s flagship is cold brew, which includes flavours like mocha, cinnamon, hazelnut, caramel and more.
Procuring the best beans: