On September 19 last year, the husband-and-wife cofounders of e-commerce company Pattern, David Wright and Melanie Alder, walked up together to the NASDAQ podium in Times Square—both dressed in black button-up shirts and custom blue and purple Nike Air Forces. Wright, CEO of the Lehi, Utah-based company, took the microphone to thank the room full of employees. “Mel and I get asked, ‘How did you do it?’ We didn’t…it’s a team sport,” Wright exclaimed as he took off his shoe, eagerly holding it up to the crowd.
Pattern’s staff wore custom-made Nike sneakers on its IPO day, which NASDAQ’s president Nelson Griggs apparently said was the first time in his 20 years he’d seen a company with its own “kicks.” SpaceX followed suit with their own green and white sneakers a year later.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
It was a surreal moment for Wright and Alder: Ringing the NASDAQ bell was something they’d never imagined when they first began reselling fridge magnets on Amazon out of Alder’s living room in 2013. “We were just trying to bring in a little extra money on the side,” Wright explains from a conference room overlooking Utah’s sprawling mountainscape from Pattern’s headquarters in the tech hub known as Silicon Slopes. “Yeah, in the beginning, it was just us trying to support our families,” Alder chimes in from the seat next to his. At the time, both were married to other people: Alder was raising four children with her now ex-husband, while Wright had six of his own with his now ex-wife.
Money is no longer a concern. Since its September IPO, Pattern’s stock price has nearly doubled, with a four-month long surge starting in March pushing the company’s market cap above $4 billion. In July, when Pattern’s stock hit a record high of $29, CEO Wright’s net worth reached $1.7 billion and chief strategy officer Alder’s climbed to $1.1 billion. Though Pattern’s stock has dropped since, the couple, who together own 55% of the company, have a combined $2.2 billion stake as of August 7, plus nearly $90 million in cash from selling some of their shares shortly after the IPO. The now married couple, who tied the knot in 2018, share 10 kids between them—including two, Wright’s daughter and Alder’s son, who began dating soon after their parents’ wedding and are now married.
Employees of the Utah-based e-commerce accelerator pictured enjoying their moment in Times Square in September 2025.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
The core of Pattern’s business is to relieve consumer brands of the major headache that comes with trying to figure out the lucrative but overly complicated online marketplaces such as Amazon, says Scott Needham, a former reseller and founder of Amazon market research firm SmartScout. Pattern buys a brand’s products in bulk, handles the entire selling process from setting up online storefronts to delivery logistics and profits from selling the products at a markup across more than 70 marketplaces including Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart and Korean shopping mall Coupang. Over the years, Pattern has added complementary technology services, using data science and AI to help more than 200 brands—including Panasonic, SkullCandy and Spanx—more effectively sell their products.
For instance, mouthwash brand SmartMouth was seeing only a handful of Amazon sales when it enlisted Pattern to help. Pattern was able to track pricing data across every mouthwash product listed on Amazon, then recommend a new price low enough to better position SmartMouth against competitors without cutting into profit. Its AI software, which was fed images and videos of SmartMouth’s mouthwashes, automated multiple ad campaigns and wrote up product descriptions that were tailored to boost the product in search rankings—based on data from competitor ads and storefronts, as well as a trove of internal data Pattern was sitting on thanks to its decade-long experience selling on Amazon. Three years later, SmartMouth says Amazon is its largest sales channel.
That playbook has helped fuel revenue growth of more than 40% every quarter since Pattern went public. Revenue hit $2.5 billion last year, up 39% from 2024, and the company has already brought in $1.6 billion in the first half of 2026. But hefty expenses from buying up all that inventory and handling shipping and returns for retailers makes Pattern’s financials look more like a clothing or restaurant business than a hot tech company: Last year’s net profit totaled just $16 million, largely due to one-time expenses from going public. For the first half of 2026, net profit was a still modest 3% of its revenue at $56 million.
Despite the capital-intensive nature of the business, Pattern has beat earnings expectations every quarter and is slowly putting its name on the map. That’s helped the little-known company garner interest from public market investors and double its stock price since March, multiple software analysts told Forbes. The six month lock-up period, during which employees or private investors cannot sell their shares after a company goes public, also ended in March—after which there were more shares available for public investors to buy.
The stock surge been enough to anoint Pattern as one of the most valuable companies in Utah’s picturesque Silicon Slopes, most notably home to tech companies including survey analytics software Qualtrics (acquired for $12.5 billion in 2023) and DNA testing service Ancestry.com (acquired for $4.7 billion in 2020). And if Wright has his way, Pattern will one day be the state’s most valuable company.
Wright grew up in Utah with five siblings—his dad was a land appraiser; his mom, an elementary school teacher. Alder was raised in Nevada with seven siblings. Her dad supported the entire family on a government job that paid just $45,000 a year, while her mom stayed home with the kids. Both Wright and Alder went on to attend Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and crossed paths at different points in their lives, but never formally met until Alder’s then-husband Scott Keate introduced them to each other. Keate had known Wright for years: the childhood neighbors grew up two houses away from each other, both attended BYU and worked at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints during an overlapping time. “Scott was someone that Dave looked up to. I think Scott was a year older than Dave, and Scott was a big star on the cross-country team growing up. And Dave was kind of in awe of him,” says a source who knew them both.
Around 2011, the two families were pursuing real estate side hustles when Keate heard Wright was looking for someone to help sell some of his properties, so Keate introduced Wright to his then-wife Alder. Over the next few years, Wright got to see her in action. “If something would hit the market, she was standing at the property when they were putting the key on the door,” Wright recalls. “She just had a way about her where she would talk people into giving her anything she wanted.”
So when Wright heard his cousin’s wife made $2 million from reselling children’s headbands online, he couldn’t think of anyone better than Alder to run the operations for a similar business he wanted to set up. Over lunch in January 2013, Alder—who stayed at home with the kids while then-husband Keate worked full-time as a consulting manager at Adobe—agreed and got to work immediately.
They started with fridge magnets, but soon expanded to supplements, lotions, essential oils—anything they could get their hands on. Everything was delivered in bulk to Alder’s home, then packaged and shipped out from her living room. She ran the day-to-day operations, while Wright would chip in—mainly on the tech side—after working his day job as a data analyst at the Church. “I didn’t dare quit my job. I didn’t know if it would work,” Wright says. “She ran it from 2013 to 2015—which, if we’re being honest, (those first two years) are when companies survive or die.”
Melanie Alder and David Wright overlapped at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah but didn’t meet each other until years later.
© 2009 Bloomberg Finance LP
B y 2015, the business, then called iServe, started taking off and signed its first contract to be the exclusive reseller to health supplement maker Thorne. The business also became dependably profitable—enough for the cofounders to take home their first paychecks—so Wright and his coworker Jason Wells, who became chief technology officer, quit their jobs to work on iServe full time. It was that year that Wright and Alder began spending noticeably more time with each other, Alder’s ex-husband Keate recalls.
It was also that year Alder and Wright say they both separately began considering divorces from their spouses, claiming they were not happy in their marriages for reasons unrelated to each other. However, Keate alleges Alder admitted to him in 2015 that she had started developing feelings for Wright. Keate says that though he does not think Wright and Alder established a formal romantic relationship prior to the divorces, the cofounders’ close relationship was a factor for him in the separation. Wright’s former wife declined to comment.
Alder, who left the Church in 2009 after growing up Mormon, says it was only after Wright left the Church that she started considering a relationship with him. Wright, who left the Church shortly after his divorce in 2016, says he mustered up the courage to ask Alder out to dinner for their first date in late 2016.“You’re taking two data-crazed fanatics and you start combining that with religion and it opens up enough questions that I guess we just sort of fell off that train,” Wright says. “Truthfully, I think that’s when the door opened for a relationship,” Alder adds. “I consider that something really important to align on.”
Less than two years after their first date, in early 2018, the cofounders got married. That same year, they also renamed their business from iServe to Pattern, opened a corporate headquarters in Utah’s Silicon Slopes and began setting up warehouses outside of Utah as they began aggressively expanding.
A fter seven years of bootstrapping the business, Pattern raised its first outside investment in 2020 across two funding rounds totaling $277 million, giving the company a $2 billion valuation at the time. The new capital was used for acquisitions, international expansion and hiring new talent as demand for their services grew. By the end of 2022, Pattern had 1,400 employees, two new offices in Singapore and India and $1 billion in annual sales.
But the company’s rapid growth came with challenges. In 2022, the founder of a skincare business that Pattern had acquired as part of a new business strategy in 2020 filed a lawsuit alleging sexist behavior from male superiors to female employees on his team. Pattern denied the claims and countersued, alleging the founder had lied about his business’ profitability to Pattern prior to the acquisition. A Pattern spokesperson told Forbes the lawsuit and countersuit between Pattern and the founder were settled in 2024 with no admission of wrongdoing from either party.
Though the lawsuits were settled, the sexist behavior detailed in the complaint wasn’t surprising, according to multiple former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity in fear of retaliation. Three former employees recounted separate instances in which male authority figures yelled and berated female employees during team meetings, with one of these instances occurring in the past year. Anonymous reviews on job board Glassdoor posted in the last few years echo similar sentiments, with one noting that the company felt like “a glorified good ol’ boys club where women are often alienated and ostracized, often unintentionally.” A more extreme review said: “If you aren’t a married male who graduated from BYU, then you have no place at this company.”
Two former employees, both of whom worked in Utah for a majority of their careers, said they felt the disrespectful behavior was not “exceptionally bad or very different” within “the bubble of Utah,” citing the state’s predominantly Mormon population, its rigid gender roles and the influence they felt it has had in workplaces where women can often feel ignored, belittled and excluded.
“Pattern takes concerns of this kind seriously,” a company spokesperson wrote to Forbes. “Pattern maintains reporting channels, including anonymous channels, for employees to raise concerns, investigates complaints when they are raised, and acts on findings.”
By the time the lawsuit was settled, Pattern had fully abandoned its short-lived strategy to build brands internally as opposed to fully relying on external customers, ultimately firing or transitioning employees they had acquired or hired for it into different departments. Similar growing pains were felt throughout the company. As Pattern’s strategy moved and changed quickly, allegedly often on Wright’s whim, several departments were subject to what multiple former employees describe as whiplash—characterized internally as “restructurings” involving abrupt layoffs. Two former executives, both of whom were fired, said five executives were let go or departed within the span of a year around 2024, with both recalling that Wright expected fierce loyalty and would be quick to fire when he felt like someone disagreed with him, especially on the direction of the company’s technology. Currently, five of 11 members of the executive team have been in their roles for less than two years. “It’s Dave’s way or the highway,” one former employee said. “Dave has been successful for a reason,” one former executive who was fired said. “The guy’s not stupid and he’s built up a team of loyal people.”
A Pattern spokesperson denied the characterization that the layoffs were abrupt or that the term “restructuring” was used to obscure their nature. “What matters most is that once we make a decision, the team moves together on it. That is commitment to the business, not to any one person,” Wright wrote to Forbes. “Personnel decisions here are based on performance and results, not on whether someone agreed with me.”
Alder, meanwhile, says she started taking a back seat at the company a few years ago, moving from her chief operating officer role to a strategy officer role in 2018. Multiple former junior-level employees say they rarely saw Alder and that nobody interacted with her on a day-to-day basis, though multiple former executives describe how the couple’s relationship and the fact that they often talked shop at home meant that she was advising him on higher-level decisions, including HR issues. Behind Wright’s decisions at the office, many believe Alder wields enormous influence. “He practically worships her,” one former executive said.
Outsiders may not get it, but Wright and Alder say they couldn’t imagine building Pattern anywhere besides Utah. “Work ethic is amazing. The people are very integral and grow up very disciplined from a very young age,” says Wright, who also cites how favorable the state is from a taxes perspective—“conservative culture favors business in many ways.” In fact, U.S. News & World Report ranked Utah as the number one overall best state in the nation this year for a record-breaking fourth consecutive year, thanks to the state’s economic growth and opportunities—including its growing tech scene—public infrastructure, and education.
Still, not a single Utah company ranks within the 500 largest public companies in the nation by revenue—and it’s both perplexing and motivating for Wright, who believes Pattern is on the path there. Some critics, like one scathing December 2025 short seller report from financial newsletter The Bear Cave, think Pattern will never get close. The report cited Pattern’s overreliance on Amazon (which represented 93% of its revenue last year), concentration in the health supplement category (69% of its inventory purchases last year) and past failures of Amazon accelerators or aggregators including Pharmapacks—which had surprisingly meaningful revenue growth in the years leading up to its bankruptcy in 2022. Pattern’s stock plummeted 13% the day the report was published last year. The stock has doubled since. (Pattern declined to comment on the report.)
Regardless, it’s never been a more exciting time for Wright and Alder. “We’re at the intersection of the most significant consumer shift and how they buy—which will be agentic commerce,” Wright says. “There was a time when we thought maybe there would just be a few AI models—OpenAI, Gemini—and I think we’re all quickly seeing there’s a lot of models out there that are winning, more than we thought.” In a future where customers can directly shop on so many different AI models, Pattern says it will treat those models like new marketplaces—similar to how it figured out TikTok Shop when it surged in popularity. Wright doesn’t detail his plans but calls AI shopping one of Pattern’s biggest opportunities yet.
It’s unclear when shopping on AI models will become the new normal or whether that may even happen, but for now, there’s no shortage of things keeping the cofounders up at night.
Leave a comment