Purple's Jason Bertrand on AI SEO: Their 6-Month Traffic Growth Playbook

Brilliant Commerce Episode 9

What happens when you stop chasing shiny tools and start doubling down on what actually drives growth?

In this episode of Brilliant Commerce, Bryan sits down with Jason Bertrand, VP of E-commerce at Purple, to unpack hard-won lessons from scaling Under Armour’s digital business in its early days to leading Purple’s $450M commerce engine today. Jason gets real about the tradeoffs behind tech complexity, why simplicity often scales better, and how his team’s AI-powered SEO strategy unlocked measurable traffic growth without adding headcount.

It’s a conversation about clarity over chaos, brand building in discount-heavy categories, and the real-world steps one operator took to make AI work on his terms.

Topics discussed:

Why headless commerce created Purple's biggest tech debt: Jason's candid assessment of how their post-COVID headless implementation overcomplicated their limited SKU catalog, and his framework for evaluating when architectural complexity actually hinders growth for brands without dedicated engineering teams.
Premium pricing discipline in discount-conditioned markets: Purple's operational approach to maintaining MAP pricing across wholesale partners with 90-day advance promotional planning, using web-exclusive products like the Purple Flex ($1,000 queen) as their only promotional lever while avoiding the industry's "fool's pricing" trap.
Multi-channel parity enforcement at $450M scale: Purple's specific guardrails for maintaining pricing consistency across D2C, 55 owned retail stores, and thousands of wholesale doors while protecting their $30-40M Amazon revenue stream and preventing internal channel conflict.
AI implementation beyond automation: How Purple deploys AI to analyze customer service conversations (chats, emails, calls) for actionable product development insights, moving beyond surface-level sentiment analysis to extract feature requests that inform their R&D roadmap.
Natural language SEO for AI search engines: Purple's tactical shift from keyword-focused optimization to conversational query optimization, resulting in measurable traffic growth from Perplexity and ChatGPT by restructuring content around customer questions rather than traditional search terms.
Progressive profiling through product quizzes: How Purple's mattress quiz captures behavioral intelligence (sleep position, partner preferences, temperature sensitivity) for personalized email sequences while building the data foundation for AI-powered product recommendations.
Team architecture for nine-figure operations: Jason's 20-person team structure spanning UI/UX, analytics, merchandising, Amazon, CRM, and SEO, with scaling insights from Under Armour's growth from $20M to $150M online and the critical handoff points between functions.
Brand positioning through messaging constraints: Purple's "less pain, better sleep" logo treatment addresses the challenge of high brand recognition with unclear brand meaning, using consistent messaging guardrails to convert awareness into purchase intent across all touchpoints.