From banking to the bedroom

Alex Ma (left) with co-founder and life-long friend Jason Da Rosa. The mattresses are sold squeezed into a convenient box. Photo credit: Skyler.

Alex Ma and Jason Da Rosa are childhood friends who are now business partners. After going to different countries for college – Alex to the UK; Jason to the US – and then having successful careers in banking, both found themselves back in their native Hong Kong at around the same time. That’s when they reconnected – just as they were both looking for something beyond corporate life.

“My parents are here, I grew up here, I’d always wanted to come back,” says Da Rosa, who returned to the city of over 7 million with his wife, who’s American. “As we were looking at places to move into, at furniture and homes, one of the things we looked at was mattresses. I was so shocked at how expensive they were here.”

So he wanted to figure out why.

“It turns out because rents – the cost of prime retail space in Hong Kong – are so high, they need to mark up the cost of mattresses so much,” Da Rosa explains. The rates, even with a recent cooling off, can be as high as US$2 million per year for a small-ish, 700-square-foot (63 square meter) shop.

His friend Ma saw the same sky-high price tags as he resettled and bought things for his new Hong Kong home too.

“I started to think of this as an opportunity,” Da Rosa adds.

That led the duo to establish their first ever business in 2016. A year later they were ready to launch it to the public: Skyler, a mattress-in-a-box startup.

It’s a lot like Casper, Leesa, Purple, and a number of other such brands that have popped up – and blown up – in the US: a retail business devoted to mattresses that behaves like a tech startup. Casper, perhaps the biggest of the bunch, is worth US$750 million as it plots an IPO.

Photo credit: Skyler.

To the friends, it seemed like “a perfect fit” to do this business online, explains Da Rosa.

“We wanted to really start something of our own – that we have control of,” adds Ma. “That can give us a challenge to really manage everything ourselves.” He was a corporate banker at HSBC, while his biz partner is a former investment banker on Wall Street who later moved into the private equity arena.

Tight squeeze

Like with the other mattress startups, being able to use some new compression tech to stuff the foam mattress into a fairly small box opened a lot of new avenues for the Skyler duo. During the design process, they also made a few Asia-specific tweaks, such as ensuring the mattress took into account the humid climate.