Wyatt Bramhall likes to dream up products that he can bring to life. Living off the land on Martha’s Vineyard, he can build products from conception to within pixels or millimeters..when he has WiFi. As a Lead Product Manager at Amazon aggregator Perch, he’s leading a supply chain roadmap to bridge the physical & digital world in order to bring more products to your doorstep faster & cheaper.
Growing up between mainland Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard with his two older sisters (who both work in tech), the outdoors has always been a passion. Part of the year, Wyatt & his fiance live in a cabin with no electricity or running water. They spend their weekends building out gravity fed water systems, learning to live off the land. At least some of the time. They still plug in to their jobs during the week. It is 2023, after all.
Wyatt’s dad started a home goods & furniture business selling to big box retailers that he ran for most of his adult life. Wyatt’s mom ran a non-profit, traveling across the world to build schools for underprivileged youth. Now, she paints. Like Wyatt’s grandfather. And Wyatt’s fiance! This is a very creative family of all types of artists.
Wyatt went off to the Rhode Island School of Design where his dad had studied too. After blowing glass in high school at a local production shop, he thought industrial design would be a great way to further his skills. At RISD, he built physical goods with metals and plastics. He drew products and then built code to automate their production. He completed his senior thesis in a joint product development program with MIT Sloan students where they were paired with an industrial designer (Wyatt) to bring a physical product to market.
When school ended, Wyatt had the bug and he was eager to continue building as a freelancer. Through MassChallenge and other startup communities, he found companies that were building physical products and needed some help. Wyatt had the tools. One time he designed & built a vibrating mat for babies that was featured on Shark Tank.
He spent a lot of his time during that period building skis for Parlor Skis and kitesurfing gear for Niash. He helped them design their products through CAD (computer aided design) drawings and then helped automate their manufacturing processes to millimeters of accuracy. CAD drawings were his bread and butter, creating products from conception all the way through implementation across five or six companies.
Eventually, he landed a full time role at Boston area technology giant Wayfair. Joining their 3D operations team, the department worked alongside their R&D lab, tasked with replacing website photography with 3D renderings & models. You can imagine the major complexity of scaling the construction and photography of hundreds of thousands of furniture SKUs across Wayfair’s platform. 3D renderings are just a tad bit cheaper and scalable. He helped expand their 3D software tool suite to automate different modeling and rendering techniques like leather chair coverings vs. wicker chair coverings. Working between the engineering & operational teams, he helped incubate ideas and scale production to offshore teams in order to reduce time to development.
Wyatt went from working at a 12 person ski company to a 12,000 person ecommerce giant. It was quite the leap. But he loved Product Management. While at the company he met the Head of Wayfair’s R&D Lab, Mike Festa, who was departing to start a 3D digital imaging company called 3XR.
Wyatt walked over to Mike’s desk to let him know he wanted to join and was willing to do whatever he could to help get the company off the ground. 3XR was building a two sided marketplace for AR (augmented reality) model creation. Luckily, there was real synergy between his background and their early needs. Wyatt pitched in on sales calls, helped with operations, instituted metrics, and oversaw engineers directly for the first time. The learning experience was priceless.
He helped the company bring an idea to market and experienced the challenge of trying to create something that customers like enough to pay for. Ultimately, 3XR shutdown, and their team open sourced the code to let the product live on. That’s just part of startup life.
During 3XR’s final fundraising process Wyatt met Perch Founder & CEO Chris Bell, a former Wayfair leader. Chris had just closed a funding round from another firm 3XR was pitching and he explained his business model. Perch is an ecommerce aggregator that buys Amazon native (niche) brands and runs them in a more efficient, standardized way. Wyatt was really bullish on Perch’s thesis and, after the conclusion of 3XR’s journey, Wyatt dusted himself off and reached out to the Perch team.
He thinks he probably called and emailed their team 10 times to get an introduction & interview. When he didn’t land a role his first go around, he let them know he was still interested before eventually joining the team as a Product Manager and their 40th employee.
Wyatt is responsible for Perch’s supply chain technology roadmap, focused on infrastructure, workflow, and automation coverage of their supply chain processes. The Perch team scaled to 300 employees within his first year and grew from running a single digit number of brands to dozens of companies. On the infrastructure side, there became a whole new set of product, process & team needs.
Wyatt’s role has evolved from personnel to process. He’s continued to stay focused on helping Perch’s brands maintain a personal voice on their platform through branding & advertising. He has taken on larger scale initiatives and helped turn strategies into team KPIs. Wyatt’s main objective is to increase the speed of their end to end supply chain, reducing the amount of time it takes to order a product, bring it here domestically, and deliver it to someone’s doorstep. To date, they’ve reduced the upstream time of ordering to shipping goods from overseas by over 50%, reducing their general costs by 20%. Automation takes time, but they’re chipping away at it!
Measure Twice, Cut Once
When Wyatt was learning about industrial design, he had a woodshop teacher that taught him to “measure twice, cut once”. You can’t exactly cut wood twice if you measure wrong. From physical goods to manufacturing processes in the literal sense, Wyatt has carried this perspective forward into his software career.
Today, he paints a picture with his mind or on a piece of paper before he goes out and acts to determine what is actually going on. He aspires to legitimize his hypothesis through experimentation before fully committing to instituting a new process or product initiative.
At Perch, more specifically, he’s made an effort to build out shared metrics in partnership with his operational team to better understand their quantitative goals. Product can be a little more qualitative, so Wyatt makes sure he understands both sides of the business and product roadmap goals before he implements a design & product strategy. In his words, he “puts his money where his mouth is” to make sure both sides are aligned.
Balance between the operational side of the business and the internal product & engineering resources helps determine which “juice is worth the squeeze” and which projects (or products) are ultimately funded through rigorous debate.
Using imagery and data, Wyatt helps shepherd both teams through a collaborative process to get aligned on a shared vision for what they’ll accomplish together.
Career Insights / Learnings
Saying Yes – “Being a ‘yes person’ has gotten me to where I am today. Not being afraid to knock on a door more than once until it gets opened has allowed me to learn a lot more than I think I would have if I had taken no for an answer. Being a yes person also involves pushing past the hesitation of not knowing and going with your gut to go figure something out and commit to it.”
Sharpening Communication – Communication should really be honed as a skill. It shouldn’t be taken lightly. No matter where you are or what you work on, good communicators are the ones who can ‘get shit done’. Focusing on that as a skill has helped me move up in my career whether it’s communicating with engineering teams or leadership on high level goals. Being able to zoom in granulary or zoom out to a high level is a skill that’s not to be taken for granted”
Wyatt is really interested in the 0-1 phase of business & product building. Starting a business of his own someday is a goal once he finds the right business and opportunity. He’s always looking! Bridging the gap between bringing nascent products to market is part of his core that he doesn’t think he’ll ever stray too far away from. What’s the best way to continue to explore? Going out, trusting his gut, and just doing it.
If you want to learn more about Wyatt, you’ll have to find him on LinkedIn when he’s online dreaming up great products. Or, maybe you’ll have to travel out to one of his favorite kitesurfing spots off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the products and supply chains you continue to create & optimize for startups in the years ahead!