Purple mattress company goes viral.

• Author: Sasich, Chris
• Position: Around Utah

Alpine -- This fairy tale came true. With more than 70 million views, a video showing Goldilocks testing out mattresses went viral, and in the process launched a brand for Purple, a comfort company that started its product line with mattresses. The benefits of a viral video go beyond establishing a brand--the company has seen massive growth in only its first year of business.

"It's been a crazy growth, and we don't really know how much we can sell, because of that problem of not being able to make as much as we'd like to," said Dan Bischoff, communications, public relations and content marketing professional for Purple. "We've invested in new machines and we're hoping that by this fall we'll be able to increase it by multiples."

Tony and Terry Pearce, the founders of Purple, a have invented and licensed products to companies like Nike and Dr. Scholls. The brothers have been granted 38 patents and have 16 patents and patents pending for the Purple product line, the core of which is a hyper-elastic polymer mattress, a material that differentiates Purple from the memory foam and latex competitors. They invented the product, the machines that make it, and they sell it via e-commerce--a development in the mattress industry that they say has revolutionized the way things are done.

"When you sell over e-commerce, you sell for less because you're not paying a mark-up for marketing costs, retail costs or having a building that you use for retail," said Bischoff. "So it's a $5,000 mattress that you buy for $1,000."

Funded by the previous success of the Pearce brothers, Purple also ran a Kickstarter campaign last October, raising $175,000 for mattress pre-orders. It was their first foray into using video and the digital landscape to sell products. The next...