se and ultimately monetise. Carr’s brand, she realised early on, sat at the intersection of luxury, wellness and hospitality.Today, Shhh Silk sells silk pillowcases, sleep masks and a range of silk accessories — from scrunchies to sleep bonnets. In the past year alone, it has secured six-figure partnerships with hotel groups, including Four Seasons, Marriott, The Wynne, and, most notably, the Beverly Hills Hotel, while completing a strategic sale of 49 per cent to one of Australia’s largest private family offices. The result is a business that has scaled by widening its frame of reference.  Before founding Shhh Silk, Carr worked in large retail organisations with multiple distribution models, experience that shaped how she thought about longevity. “When you’re predominantly e-commerce, it can be really easy to stop and look outside of that world,” she told Inside Retail. “I wanted to build a brand that becomes heritage and can stand the test of time.” By her second year, she had concluded that an online presence alone would not deliver that outcome. Hospitality offered something different: scale, repetition and trust. “I had a mindset of, okay, I need to look at different channels that are quite large and come with capacity to scale,” Carr said. “For me, it was really obvious that that would be hospitality.. especially because we play in luxury.” Shhh Silk began working with hotels in 2016–17, but Carr describes the channel as a long play. It really didn’t take off until 2024, she admitted, when global travel rebounded and the business entered some of the world’s largest hotel chains. The brand’s first major hospitality win, The Beverly Hills Hotel, became a quiet accelerant. “That allowed us to get a lot of exposure,” Care said. “Thats how we got most celebrity exposure, because celebrities genuinely love to stay at that hotel and purchase products from the store.” More importantly, Shhh Silk’s offer remained structurally distinct with fully customised sleepwear programs bespoke to individual properties. “We don’t have one hotel we’ve ever just done one order for,” she noted. “It’s highly repeatable.” That repeatability proved critical as the business confronted a turbulent 2025.  Silk supply chains remain concentrated. “93 per cent of the worlds pure silk is still grown and harvested in China,” Carr said, and tariffs hit hardest in the US, Shhhh Silk’s largest market. “It was pretty tough,” she said. The difference this time was capital structure. Selling 49 per cent of the business provided margin tolerance and long term alignment. “I just wouldn’t be able to back myself as a self-funded founder,” she said. “Thank god I went through that process.”  Operationally, Carr rebuilt Shhh Silk’s commercial model to support global hospitality at scale, while relaunching the brand and website to centre what she names “rest as the new luxury.” This included the launch of the world’s first AI-powered Sleep Concierge, part of a broader strategy to automate complexity while protecting human connection. “We want to be a really human, heart-first brand, but powered by technology,” she said. “Saving the humans in our business to be really customer-focused.” AI now supports design, concept development and logistics across hundreds of touchpoints per hotel collection. Carr’s equally deliberate about how the business operates internally. Shhh Silk runs on a practice known as authentic relating with daily connection circles focused on how teams feel, not just what they ship. “We lead with heart,” she said. “It’s not really a strategy, it’s our DNA.” That philosophy extends to customer relationships. Carr recounts a recent example where a customer misunderstood a eucalyptus based cooling sleepwear range. Instead of processing, the team refunded the purchase and encouraged the customer to keep the product as a gift. “That’s just not how brands normally treat customers,” Carr said. “But that’s how we operate.” For Carr, the most consequential decision in Shhh Silk’s growth was internal. Midway through her founder journey, she learned to detach her identity from the business itself. “I realised I was stunting the growth of the business because she was so attached,” she recounted. Letting go unlocked partnership, trust and scale. “The minute I released the need to control everything, this business flourished.” What emerges is a leadership model that resists the prevailing logic of modern retail. In Carr’s hands, softness becomes structural. Rest becomes repeatable. And scale, paradoxically, comes from slowing down. Olivia Carr was speaking to Inside Retail after finishing third in our Top 50 People in E-Commerce, presented by Australia Post. You can read the report in full here.