5 minutes
Purple: A mattress that’s juuust right
How a viral product demo helped Purple achieve launch success
Lightweight wheelchairs, shoe insoles, ankle and knee braces—if you’ve used any of these products, there’s a chance they were invented by Tony and Terry Pearce. Between them, these two brothers have 50 patents and licensed their tech to companies like Dr. Scholl’s, Nike, and Johnson & Johnson.
After 20 years of discoveries and product developments, the Pearce brothers brought the very first Hyper-Elastic Polymer™ mattress to market via Purple. And this direct-to-consumer mattress-in-a-box company went viral pretty quickly.
This week, Case Studied examines how Harmon Brothers created a viral video that helped Purple achieve a wildly successful launch and stand out in a saturated mattress market.
The Brief:
Purple got its start in 2015 with a Kickstarter campaign that aimed to raise $25k. The company immediately flexed its cinematic flair in the Kickstarter video they made to explain the company’s product and mission.
We can’t see the number of views the video racked up on Kickstarter but it’s safe to say, it did its job. Purple’s campaign raised $171,560, almost 7x more than their original goal.
To help them build off this initial momentum, Purple partnered with the viral video pros at Harmon Brothers—the same marketing agency that created viral product videos for Poo Pourri and Squatty Potty. Their challenge was simple enough: film a mattress product demo that will drive sales.
But how can you showcase a mattress without letting someone sleep on it?
The Execution:
One of the unique elements of Purple’s product is that a raw egg won’t break under pressure on their mattress because of its cushioning. With this differentiator in mind, Purple and Harmon Brothers explored a few storytelling angles.
At first they had someone simply sit on an egg that’s placed on the Hyper-Elastic Polymer™ material. But that wasn’t a particularly engaging way to execute the demonstration.
It needed more shock-value, more drama.
And they added those ingredients by gluing 4 raw eggs to a 330 lb piece of tempered glass and dropping it onto a Purple mattress from a 3 ft. distance. Add in a fictional character and some product messaging, and you’ve got the final outcome: the Goldilocks Raw Egg Test video.
The video includes all the main selling points of the mattress, background on the brand, even the price point of their product. But the real priority here was emotional storytelling. They executed this through:
🥚 a show-and-tell narrative
🤭 purposeful humor
🛌 lighthearted suspense
Purple mattresses are a unique product in an industry that’s mostly predictable. And Harmon Brothers skillfully played into that with a dramatized but intentional product demo and meticulous production.
The Results:
Within one day of the raw egg test video launching, Purple was backlogged with orders to the point where their team was nervous about scaling sales of the $1k hero product. After all, who doesn’t love a good night’s sleep and a show-and-tell experiment, right?
According to Harmon Brothers’, the video helped Purple increase revenue from $0 to over $100m run rate in 14 months. It generated over 194 million views.
On Purple’s side, John Megibow—the first CEO appointed to the company since it went public in 2018—reflected on how the Goldilocks video “took off like wildfire.” As the company continued to create marketing videos, Megibow noted the importance of execution over perfection.
“It doesn’t matter if some of them don’t work, because the lift and the leverage that we would get from the ones that did work more than offset the ones that didn’t.”
The Takeaways:
Not all unique selling propositions can be demonstrated with an experiment, and that’s okay. There are still plenty of learnings that can be taken from Purple’s launch campaign.
Here are a few takeaways:
1. Be intentional about storytelling 📖
A mattress made from a new type of material isn’t very exciting. Purple and Harmon Brothers made the Hyper-Elastic Polymer™ mattress exciting with a thoughtful, carefully crafted story.
Workshop your story, be creative, and host focus groups to make sure your story is as engaging as it can be.
2. Be mindful about timing ⏰
Purple recognized the momentum they built with their Kickstarter campaign and sought out expert support to keep it going.
When time is of the essence, consider all your options and check any blindspots you might have. If it doesn’t make sense to leverage in-house support, a fresh set of external eyes can make a major difference.
3. It’s a numbers game 🎲
When it comes to creative in marketing, no one can predict what is going to work. That is why variety, a process for learning, and an appetite for testing are what will ultimately yield results.
Don’t let a few losses discourage you from continuing to pump out great content, you never know what is going to stick.
4. Experience is THE difference-maker 🔎
When evaluating agency partners, the most important factor to consider (and the biggest decision criteria we use at Vendry) is what exposure this agency has to solving my specific problem.
In the case of Harmon Brothers, their unique experience in creating successful videos for other Direct-to-Consumer brands enabled them to achieve success quickly, without the long ramp-up period a less seasoned partner might need.
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