“We’re riding a rocket ship right now,” says 2006 MBA alum Sam Bernards of his work with one of Utah’s fastest-growing companies, comfort-tech manufacturer Purple. His career has been a series of fast-paced experiences, from innovating within the world’s largest retailer to angel and venture investing, and he’s not planning to stop pursuing new ideas anytime soon.
After finishing his undergrad in applied physics at BYU in 2001, Bernards jumped into the startup world as a technical cofounder at an internet car-sales company that didn’t survive the dot-com bubble’s burst. After scaling the Larry H. Miller Group’s financial division and working with several other startups, Bernards headed back to BYU for his MBA. While there, he set—and accomplished—the goal of winning a business plan competition. His next stop: Bentonville, Arkansas.
There he worked with a team to streamline Walmart’s global supply chain and save it $2 billion a year. Then the fun really got started: Bernards moved to the company’s new format development team.
“I created what could be considered an internal startup,” Bernards says of his work on Walmart Express, a line of small-format stores. “Walmart as a company was optimized for the supercenter; it managed large stores serviced by large trucks in relatively small towns. Our plan called for small stores serviced by small trucks in large towns. It was just so backward to everything that it was very difficult to get any support.”
So he got creative. Bernards’s team bought nonperishable products from the top competitors and placed them side by side with the equivalent products from Walmart. By each product, they placed a sticky note to indicate which had the best price—blue for Walmart, yellow and red for the competitors. The CEO and a team of VPs came for a tour and left shocked.
“It was a sea of yellows,” Bernards says. “That experience was the beginning of our institutional support.” The initiative launched in several cities and quadrupled its projected sales. After the innovative store became part of the official Walmart fleet, Bernards realized that he missed working with startups.
He left the corporate world and, after launching a startup, became a founding member of Peak Ventures, an early-stage Utah venture capital firm. There he worked closely with the companies and entrepreneurs he invested in. “Life at the early stage is fun because it’s messy,” he says. “Hustle is the name of the game; you don’t have the answers, so you experiment.”
Bernards’s appointment as CEO of Purple—manufacturer of the Purple mattress—in September 2016 has him excited to build again. The company launched in January 2016 and has since seen considerable growth. Under Bernards’s leadership, the company is building an “innovation factory,” including a 574,000-square-foot facility that will expand its capacity to explore additional products.
“We have experienced no ceiling on the demand for our products and are limited in growth only by manufacturing constraints,” Bernards says. “We have the right team and business model to invent life-changing products, bring them to market, and scale them quickly.”
With this model in place, Bernards plans to make Purple Utah’s next unicorn, or startup valued at over
$1 billion. But it’s not all about the money.
“I love the ability to change things for the better,” Bernards says. “Purple has that ability to change people’s lives fundamentally. It begins with a good night’s rest. This is what really drives me: the ability to make meaningful progress for other people.”
Bernards and his wife, Julia, have four children, all of whom appreciate their father’s efforts to find acceptable jokes online rather than rely on his “dad humor.” Bernards loves exploring the outdoors by taking to Utah’s trails on his electric mountain bike.
