This story appears in the May 15, 2017 issue of undefined. Subscribe

Brothers Tony (left) and Terry Pearce believe their stretchy patented polymer is going to shake up... [+] the bedding business. (Photo by Tim Pannell for Forbes.)

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."

Purple's revenues are expected to surpass $200 million this year. That's still a pinprick in the $15 billion bedding industry, which is dominated by Tempur Sealy International and Serta Simmons Bedding, and it's just one of a slew of so-called bed-in-a-box companies (including Casper, Tuft & Needle and Leesa) that have been shaking up the industry by selling directly to consumers online. The Pearces believe they have an edge with Purple, which prices a queen at $999, because of its patented hyperelastic polymer. (For more on the other mattress startups, see here.)

Mormon brothers with 44 children and grandchildren between them, Tony, 61, and Terry, 68, have spent their lives focused on family, church and inventions. In their Purple T-shirts with company messages on the back (e.g., "Sleep Technologist"), they are low-key and approachable. They own 88% of Purple--employees own the rest--and they have been talking with investors about raising capital to expand.

"It's a manufacturing business in freaking Alpine, Utah. Everyone was talking," says Diogo Myrrha of Peak Ventures, a Provo-based venture capital firm. Soon after Purple's launch, "every investor had caught wind of it. 'Is this a thing?' 'Is it for real?' 'Is it sustainable?' "

In 1989, when Tony, an aerospace engineer with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Brigham Young University, and Terry, a manufacturing guy with a civil engineering degree from the University of Utah, were fly-fishing in the Rockies, they had the typical entrepreneurs' epiphany that they'd rather work for themselves. After designing a lightweight carbon-fiber wheelchair, they learned that users needed better cushioning to help prevent pressure sores. They created a cushioning fluid called Floam, then licensed it to major brands like Hill-Rom, which used it in critical-care hospital beds, and Johnson & Johnson, which put it in ankle and knee braces. "It became an extremely popular and well-used cushioning system," Tony says, "but it was a little expensive."

Through their invention factory, called Edizone (after Edison), they set out to make something cheaper and more consumer-friendly. In 1995, they came up with hyperelastic polymer, a gel-like material that's strong and stretchy. They licensed their patent to Dr. Scholl's, which used it in its ubiquitous blue insoles, and to Stryker for hospital beds. Edizone became a 30-person operation with its own factory.

While the Pearces have 50 patents between them and have had around 100 licensed products on the market over the years, the licensing business is tough. A licensor generally makes just a few percentage points on the revenues of products sold. Toys that the Pearces invented--a major part of their operation for a while--often lasted only a year on the shelves. By 2008, they had decided to make something themselves. In 2010, they started selling seat cushions under the name WonderGel. Less knowledgeable about marketing, the Pearces reached out to Bernards--who is Tony's nephew by marriage--for advice on how to sell them at retail. Bernards, who is 40 and has an M.B.A. from Brigham Young University, had worked for Wal-Mart on the launch of Walmart Express. With Bernards' advice, the Pearces got their seat cushions onto Amazon and into Bed Bath & Beyond and, more recently, Sam's Club.

Then, as the bed-in-a-box business gained steam, the Pearces started thinking about mattresses. They had already licensed a version of the blue gel to Advanced Comfort Technology, makers of the Intellibed, which had exclusive rights to it in consumer mattresses ($3,800 for a queen) in the U.S. and Canada. A dispute between the two over that patent resulted in a lengthy court case that was settled in 2010 with an agreement that allowed Intellibed to keep using the license.

Terry, the machine geek of the brothers, spent more than two years and $3 million creating a souped-up injection-molding machine. Again, they turned to Bernards and a group of consultants for marketing advice. One key decision: They would color the gel purple--to differentiate it from their blue gel--and they would call the company Purple. In September 2015, the Pearces tested their new mattress on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $25,000. The campaign brought in $171,560.

Next, they hired Harmon Brothers, a Provo-based marketing shop that had made viral videos for Squatty Potty (with a rainbow-pooping unicorn) and PooPourri. "They had us sit on a raw egg on top of their bed," Daniel Harmon says, "and we watched it not break, and we were like, 'Wow, what's going on here?' " In the nearly four-minute-long video the Harmons produced, a Goldilocks character lowers 330 pounds of tempered glass onto four eggs on the mattress. The eggs don't crack because they nestle into the purple gel. When the egg test is applied to several unidentified hard and soft mattresses, the eggs crack. The video has garnered 158 million views on YouTube and Facebook. (For our sidebar on Harmon Brothers, see here.)

Purple launched on January 22, 2016. "Within a day," Tony says, "we had sold so many mattresses that we were insanely behind." He asked Bernards to join as CEO. "They were a little spooked by the scale of the growth, and they wanted somebody who could scale it," says Bernards, who said no for months before agreeing to join. In September, Purple launched a Kickstarter for a pillow made of the purple gel and weighing 10 pounds that raked in $2.6 million, putting it among the top 50 campaigns of all time. Bernards is now creating an innovation factory at Purple that will be run by the Pearces and will make all types of cushioning products for the consumer and medical markets. "My job is to come up with crazy ideas," says Tony, even though he plans to take a sabbatical to go on a second Mormon mission this year. "I don't think I'm going to turn off my inventor brain while I'm gone."

But it's one thing to watch an idea take off and another to build a sustainable business. The latter will require Bernards and his team, including Craig Gygi, whom he brought in as COO, to ramp up manufacturing without falling too far behind on orders or overspending on machines. David Wolfe, CEO of Leesa, a competitor that had nearly $80 million in sales last year, says that in an industry in turmoil, different companies will take different approaches. "Purple is taking a huge risk building a new factory. That's not my way," he says. Gygi, who has held operations roles at MasterControl and Fiji Water, says the key is to set up operations correctly at the beginning rather than doing as most startups do and fixing them after the fact. "When you scale, the problems that were invisible before become crippling," he says.

Back at the Purple factory, Terry stops in front of a pile of Purple gel layers. "You saw the egg tests," he says. "Want to see the Terry test?" Then he stands straight, folds his arms across his chest and does a trust fall backward onto the pile.