From Sioux Falls to Walmart nationwide, local company lands ‘golden ticket’ to scale product

Considering the product, dreaming big on the verge of a national retail launch for a pillow manufactured in Sioux Falls seems fitting.

“My main goal for OmniPillow is we want to be in every bed in America,” said Chad Yde, founder of Beds by Design.

While Yde’s business began by producing custom mattresses in 2005, the OmniPillow came along about a decade later, “and it’s been expanding ever since,” Yde said.

It’s about to take its biggest step yet, earning a “golden ticket” at Walmart’s 2025 Open Call manufacturing event, meaning it ultimately will be available in Walmart stores across the country and online at Walmart.com.

“We realized this is a product people are really interested in,” Yde said. “We made adaptations over time and continued to innovate.”

The OmniPillow is an adjustable pillow filled with the company’s patented OmniFlow foam designed to increase head and neck support. A copper-infused outer casing is marketed to be bacteria-killing and odor-free. It uses a NASA-approved, responsive temperature-control material.

“It was a crazy process and a byproduct of one of our top-tier mattresses,” said Logan Landon, director of outbound sales. “People who like a soft pillow like it, and people who like a firm pillow like it.”

While the company started off selling a couple hundred pillows annually, sales topped 10,000 pillows last year between in-store and online.

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A TikTok video showing an OmniPillow being rolled up has been viewed more than 1 million times.

“There’s more gimmicks out there than anything. You have pillows that are round and curved and square and gel, and once you hold this pillow, it’s what a pillow should feel like,” Yde said. “We don’t want to sell a gimmick.”

Building a fan base

When a colleague recommended that Heath Marsh try the OmniPillow, he decided to see what it could do for “my own beaten and battered body from college football and years of accidents,” he said. “I went into Beds by Design, grabbed a pillow and ended up there two or three hours because I got engrossed by how they make their pillows and mattresses.”

Marsh, a chiropractor at HealthSource Chiropractic of Sioux Falls South, found the “quality of sleep was phenomenal,” he said. “You can’t cookie-cutter an approach to the pillow. They’re custom with more fill or less, and I felt like the customer service on their end has been outstanding, which is easy for me to sell. And they stand by their product.”

He offers the pillows for sale at his office and said patients are drawn to a pillow that the company will fill with more or less material, as well as supporting a local business.

Marsh also uses them in the clinic, and “I literally will have people lay down on my table (and say to them) ‘here’s what it feels like,’” he said.

The relationship has broadened into a national one with HealthSource Chiropractic, as Beds by Design distributes pillows to its 400 locations nationwide.

“If you’re not sleeping well, every other facet is going to suffer,” Marsh said. “This is a game-changer. I’m sleeping better. They’re not coming in as much with chronic problems, and they’re not receiving as much treatment.”

Kyle Schock, president and CEO of Bird Dog Hospitality, got to know Yde through the Sioux Falls business community and decided to try his mattress and pillow to potentially use in the company’s EverSpring Inn + Suites hotels.

“It’s what I sleep on,” he said. “It’s the first foam-based pillow I’ve ever tried that hits both supportive and soft. I bet the number of pillow samples we’ve tried in the last 10 years is about four dozen pillows, and there’s just not even a contest between this and second place.”

He credits the mattresses and pillows for helping the company’s hotels score at the top of national ranking websites.

“We have literally the best bed you can sleep on in a hotel. It’s that good, and we do it all in the midscale segment, not the luxury segment,” he said.

“That’s what we were able to do with Chad. I’m not trying to oversell it. I asked a couple managers for feedback, and the one in Bismarck said she had someone a week or two ago say, ‘It’s the first morning in years I haven’t woken up without back pain.’”

Well-known hotel guests have becoming raving fans too. When PGA legendary golfer John Daly and Mississippi singer-songwriter Steve Azar stayed in Sioux Falls at another hotel using the Beds by Design mattress and pillow, they asked to know more about the bedding.

“We drove a bed down to Steve Azar and John Daly, and we sent pillows at first,” Yde said. “Once they get the pillow in their head, it’s the game-changer. We talk to him (Daly) every time he comes to the (Sanford) International, and he’s been a really big advocate for us.”

Selling the story

Landon had all those testimonials in his mind as he reached out to Walmart about participating in this year’s Open Call — equivalent to a Shark Tank-style competition hosted by the global retail giant.

“Sometimes, it’s hard to cold call these big businesses, so we when we found Walmart doing an open call and an initiative to bring more American-made products in to boost our economy and counteract tariffs, we thought it was something cool to apply for,” he said.

Out of more than 5,000 applicants, about 500 were named finalists and invited to Bentonville, Arkansas, to do a live pitch.

“It was a great experience. The first day it was a bunch of different seminars, previous open call (winners) and people in the industry walking through how to scale business to this degree,” Landon said. “Most of these companies are small businesses, so (they talked about) what it’s like to work with Walmart, what you can expect from a production-capacity standpoint.”

Then, each finalist had 30 minutes to pitch a product to members of Walmart’s team.

Landon was asked about the company’s mission statement, core business and why the product would be a good fit for Walmart.

“They look at what your business has done and what your numbers have looked like,” he said.

He left with a “golden ticket,” which is an invitation to begin the process of finalizing agreements to sell the OmniPillow through Walmart’s stores and website.

The expectation is that the pillows will continue to sell for $29 to $189 depending on the size. A king is $129, and a queen is $119.

“We don’t think people get priced out,” said Landon, adding that comparison shopping revealed that they’re easily competitive and that the pillow’s longevity makes it a good investment.

Sales for Walmart likely will start online first and follow with in-store inventory sometime next year.

“We’re excited for the challenge,” Yde said. “I think it’s what every small business dream is to be. We’re well aware that now the real work is going to start. We have space to do that and capacity and the right team in place to make the scaling happen.”

The store in Sioux Falls at 2720 S. Louise Ave. is in the midst of an exterior renovation.

“We’re in the process of redoing the outer shell, and we’ll scale as the orders come in,” Yde said. “We could be in another warehouse. It just depends.”

There’s also a storefront in Fargo, which does manufacturing as well, and a newly opened location in Denver.

For every pillow purchased, Beds by Design donates one to someone in need. To celebrate the national launch, it’s offering the pillows buy-one-get-one-free to customers through this month.

“I started Beds by Design 20 years ago, and now it’s almost like while we make an amazing product and I’m proud of our product, the pillow is starting to become bigger than what the bed has ever been,” Yde said.

With a national launch ahead and potentially other resulting opportunities, “nothing would surprise me with Chad and that team,” Schock said. “Chad is the definition of an entrepreneur. He will work as hard as it takes and be as relentless as it takes to figure out what he needs to figure out.”

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