Mattress Missionaries

After inventing and licensing “cushion technology” for decades, Tony and Terry Pearce launched a startup to make and sell mattresses. In just a year, Purple has surpassed $50 million in revenue, with plans to crack open a very crowded field.

 

- Amy Feldman

From Salt Lake City it’s a 40-minute drive west, past the salt flats, to the desolate rural county of Tooele, where a building the size of three Walmart Supercenters sits across the street from a rarely used motor-sports track. Last fall, brothers Tony and Terry Pearce, native Utahns and longtime inventors, leased the 574,000-square-foot building as a factory for Purple, their mattress and comfort-technology startup. In less than a year, Purple has grown so fast—boosted by a multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaign and an unlikely viral marketing video—that it outgrew the small factory at its Alpine, Utah, headquarters as revenues surged past an estimated $50 million for 2016.

On a recent morning, the Pearces and the company’s CEO, Sam Bernards, watched the second of the company’s patented Mattress Max machines being tested. The machine extruded a gravelly, nontoxic purple material onto a giant mold that squeezed and heated it like a waffle iron, then rolled out a queen-bed-size piece of latticed gel, ready to be attached to two layers of foam and then encased in fire-retardant cotton and a polyester-spandex cover. As of February, the factory, a former distribution center for consumer-products giant Reckitt Benckiser, had just one mattress-production line set up. The plan is to build up to 16 mattress lines— plus dozens of additional lines for pillows and seat cushions—at a cost of $40 million or more. Purple hopes to get the third and fourth Mattress Max machines running by summer, and a new HR director is scrambling to hire workers as the head count soars past 600. “The world is getting mad at us that you cannot buy Purple beds and Purple products without a wait,” Tony says. “Our objective is to sell $2 billion out of that factory in a few years.”