A mattress factory in a Jiangsu county town that started with 100,000 yuan in capital now sells 8.9 billion yuan a year.

In 2003, Mr. Ni used 100,000 yuan in startup capital borrowed from his cousin, plus a memory foam cutting machine, to start his entrepreneurial journey in a rented factory of less than 500 square meters in Rugao, Nantong, Jiangsu. This was the starting point of the Mlily business.

At that time, he could never have imagined that his small startup factory,would one day grow into a global company with annual revenue exceeding 8.9 billion yuan.

This businessman, who appeared on the Hurun Global Rich List 10 years ago with a fortune of 7 billion yuan, used his entrepreneurial experience to give many cross-border sellers a powerful shot in the arm.

A pillow from Huaqiangbei opened up the Ren and Du meridians

Image source: Google

Mr. Ni graduated from Tongji University. In his early years, he worked deeply in the equipment engineering field, with almost no connection to the later huge home furnishing business empire.

If we trace the earliest entrepreneurial opportunity, it was a shopping trip in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen.

At that time, he spent nearly half a month's salary to buy a memory foam pillow priced at around 1,000 yuan for his girlfriend.

The user experience brought by this pillow left a deep impression on him. The slow-rebound material can slowly recover after being compressed, reducing pressure on the body's joints and muscles.

He also captured two major business opportunities from this: first, he could enter the memory foam home consumer goods track; second, he could do business in memory foam sponge cutting machine equipment.

After figuring out the direction, he decided to run two lines in parallel: selling sponge cutting equipment on one hand and selling memory foam finished products on the other.

In 2003, Mr. Ni established a factory in Rugao, Nantong, Jiangsu, focusing on sponge processing and memory foam OEM manufacturing, and taking on some overseas foreign trade orders.

Image source: Google

In the early days of entrepreneurship, even with continuous investment in R&D, the company could only receive a small number of small clients sporadically, and business progress was very difficult.

The turning point came in 2004. That year, he won a large foreign trade order of 10 containers at the Canton Fair, and the company entered the right track.

Over the following three years, its sponge cutting equipment and memory foam finished products also grew from sales of several hundred thousand to the scale of millions and tens of millions.

The user experience of a product can sometimes point the way better than a market research report. An entrepreneur's sensitivity to demand often determines how far the company can go.

Image source: Google

Chinese people prefer hard beds, but he took a different track

2008 was a key dividing point in Mr. Ni's career development. That year, he smelled a huge business opportunity in the sleep track.

At that time, the domestic market generally believed in the concept of sleeping on hard beds. In the public's conventional perception, the elderly, children, and people with waist ailments should all sleep on hardboard beds.

But consumer habits in European and American markets were completely opposite. Local consumers rarely slept on hard beds and placed more emphasis on mattress comfort, pressure relief, and sleep-support performance.

The differences in consumer habits between China and foreign countries, in Mr. Ni's eyes, were a rare development opportunity.

In 2008, the company launched its own brand MLILY, officially moving from contract manufacturing to its own brand and focusing its business on the mattress track.

Image source: Google

After two years of R&D refinement and repeated trial and error, in 2010, MLILY launched a non-temperature-sensitive zero-pressure foam mattress. The product does not harden even in low-temperature environments, balancing body support and sleeping comfort, and solved the industry pain point that traditional memory foam tends to harden in low-temperature environments.

This technological breakthrough brought it a large number of overseas foreign trade orders. It helped MLILY reach annual revenue of 6.739 hundred million yuan in 2011.

It can be seen that differences in consumption habits are not an obstacle but an opportunity. Finding a group of people with unmet needs makes it easier to gain a firm foothold than fighting for share in a red ocean.

Image source: Google

Expanding overseas in a big way, smoothly listed on A-shares

Foreign trade orders continued to surge, confirming strong overseas market demand for this type of mattress product, and MLILY also took overseas markets as a key expansion direction.

In 2012, it established a subsidiary, MLILY USA, in the U.S. market, officially entering North America and starting its global layout.

On one hand, the brand relied on distributor networks to expand overseas coverage; on the other hand, it built its own factories in multiple countries, successively setting up in Thailand, Serbia, the United States, Spain, and other places, enjoying supply chain barrier dividends and seizing overseas share ceded by competitors.

In 2016, MLILY successfully listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and was called the "first stock in memory foam mattresses." In the same year as the listing, Mr. Ni also made the Hurun Global Rich List with a net worth of 70 hundred million yuan.

Image source: MLILY

Multi-brand matrix implemented, orders continue to be released

However, MLILY's overseas expansion did not rely only on the single brand MLILY fighting alone.

From 2017 to 2021, the company successively launched a series of overseas channel acquisitions, including Spain's leading local mattress chain Maxcolchón, large U.S. furniture chain MOR Furniture For Less, and German sleep brand Matratzen Concord.

The addition of these brands' offline physical channels provided MLILY with channels to directly reach end consumers in Europe, helping the brand further develop local markets.

Later, in 2023, the company launched an overseas sub-brand EGO HOME for cross-border online channels, forming a dual-brand matrix of MLILY (comprehensive main brand) + EGO HOME (online DTC brand), using differentiated product positioning to avoid internal cannibalization.

In terms of development, the two brands also continued to push on online positions such as Amazon and independent sites. Through the comprehensive rollout of channels, they provided consumers with diverse purchasing paths, and order scale continued to rise accordingly.

Image source: Amazon

According to the annual report data released by MLILY, in 2025, the company achieved operating revenue of 89.12 hundred million yuan.

Among them, overseas online sales performed particularly prominently, reaching 23.31 hundred million yuan, an increase of 62.30%, and have become the core engine driving the company's overall revenue growth.

Image source: TikTok

Riding the social media traffic tailwind to achieve another growth breakthrough

MLILY's revenue is highly dependent on overseas markets, so the brand also targeted overseas social platforms to tap incremental space, with TikTok being a key area of focus.

MLILY, as the main brand, has made expanding into the Southeast Asian market its core direction on TikTok, with the most operational investment going into the account @MLILY MALAYSIA created for Malaysia.

The account closely follows young people's content preferences and produces a large number of short-drama videos, updating in episodic formats such as PART1/2/3 and EP1-10. The video covers pair short, eye-catching suspense copy to spark users' desire to click.

This type of content is highly entertaining and can keep building users' anticipation for subsequent episodes, effectively increasing fan stickiness. At the same time, brand placement is very soft and does not come across as blunt hard advertising, making it easier for users to accept.

Image source: TikTok

The sub-brand EGO HOME, however, has taken a different TikTok operation route: large-scale batch collaborations with home-category influencers, using the influencers' perspectives to complete product seeding and brand communication.

For example, a short video in collaboration with influencer @preetyomahs.world uses a real parent-child home leisure scene to intuitively show the comfortable experience of using the mattress.

Rather than direct selling, it uses the influencer's real usage footage to subtly stimulate consumers' purchase intention. The brand does not need much rhetoric or preaching; the video scene itself delivers the product value.

It can be said that social media content is not an optional bonus, but a key channel that determines whether a brand can be seen and remembered.

Final thoughts

MLILY was able to achieve over RMB 8.9 billion in revenue in 2025; products and channels are its two legs, and it cannot walk steadily without either one.

For a low-frequency, high-experience category like mattresses, consumers are willing to place an order only if the brand first lets them see it, touch it, and trust it. Only when channels are broad enough and content is soft enough does the brand have a chance to be picked from the shelf.

For cross-border sellers, there is one saying worth remembering: channels are roads, content is the lamp; no matter how wide the road is built, if the lamp is not lit, no one dares to walk.

Overseas markets are vast, but the blank spaces are being filled in one by one. Those who repair the road and light the lamp one step earlier will have the chance to start running while others are still looking for direction.