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Lloyd & Sue Ecker Invent The Snorinator, Along With A Lifetime of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Gambits
By Tina Traster
This is the story of an indefatigable Pomona couple who have perfected the art of entrepreneurialism. Really, this could be a book, because the path Sue and Lloyd Ecker have been on for a half century is laden with life lessons and inspiration.
The pairing begins with a “meet cute” at Ithaca College in the 1970s and who are now the subject of news stories because the couple landed $100,000 from two Shark Tank investors for a foam memory pillow, which they invented to stop people from snoring.
On Oct. 2, Lloyd, who is tall and lanky, and his wife Sue, who is petite but plucky, pitched the sharks on their patented pillow that they’ve dubbed “The Snorinator.” Dressed alike in blue T-shirts, they lured Lori Greiner and Michael Strahan to get in bed together on a $100,000 investment, for a 25 percent stake in the pillow company.
Notably, the couple use a bit of marriage schtick to sell: Lloyd, a chronic snorer, laments he was kicked out of bed by his wife and deployed to the den couch — fully understanding how to break the fourth wall with his theatrics. The couple tell the sharks they had a friend in the “foam” business and worked with him for months to R&D the inventive upright pillow. They explain having discovered the “High Fowler’s Position,” a sleeping posture recommended by a late-19th century doctor to help people clear their airwaves.
Because millions of Americans suffer with incurable snoring, the sharks wanted to know more. The Eckers tell them they’ve invested nearly $500,000 to develop the pillow, and to date have sold 3,000 units at $159.99 apiece. Most bow out but Greiner makes the argument that snoring is a universal problem and is intrigued because she believes so many snoring solutions fail.
The Eckers were hoping to give away only 10 percent of the company’s equity but after a brief husband and wife pow-wow, they accept the offer and seal it with a kiss. The two are made for the camera.
The theatrical bent begins in college when Lloyd was a concert promoter.
“He took me to see Better Midler perform on our first date,” Sue recalls. This was 1973, long before Bette was a star, but the date made an impression. As the story goes, Lloyd says he had trouble recruiting talent because he was competing with a large concert hall at neighboring Cornell University.
“I called every single promotor and nothing,” he said. “They told me they had a ‘new girl,’ and I said I don’t care who it is.” On their first date, Sue found herself sitting next to an empty chair when the light went down because Lloyd was up on stage, welcoming Midler.” This opened the door to hobnobbing with other celebrities, which excited Sue.
“I realized he wasn’t a schlub,” she said. “So we got married and had three kids.”
Both Sue and Lloyd grew up in hard-working entrepreneurial families: Sue grew up in Springfield, New Jersey, in a restaurant family, while Lloyd, who came from Yonkers, was a student of the restaurant supply business. Both understood the art of the mom-and-pop life, and neither were afraid to reinvent it – even though it came with risk, hardship but also reward.
Lloyd stepped into the family business but by the 1980s recession hit hard. Around that time, Sue made him a hat that celebrated fathers-to-be. It attracted attention when he wore it to the beach. The couple founded BeeGotten Creations, selling hats and shirts to maternity stores for six years.
“I learned to break down doors,” said Lloyd. “But I’d been doing that since cub scouts. I used to get all the awards for selling the most.”
The company rode out the success, selling to two large maternity chains. They even landed on a Today Show segment. But in 1991, another recession shuttered the chains, and the entrepreneurs were looking for a lifeline. The Eckers instinctively knew the “baby” business would always be lucrative; this was pre-internet and the couple gathered tens of thousands of names and addresses to send catalogs for “free stuff” to pregnant women. The gold they’d mined were the names and contact information. The pair eventually founded an internet company, Baby to Bee, a novelty baby hat business, which they sold to Inuvo, Inc. in 2006 for $23 million.
They followed up with another website, All About the Baby, a children’s media platform, in 2011, which they still run.
“Lloyd doesn’t understand the word ‘no,’ said Sue. “With him, the sky’s the limit.”
Lloyd agrees.
“I’m like a modern-day Gump. I do not wallow. When I’m down, it usually takes me 10 minutes to do the next thing.
Sue said she is the ballast to this unstoppable man.
“It’s very challenging to be the wife of a serial entrepreneur,” she said. “There are a lot of ups and downs. I support him up to a point, until I say it’s time to do something else. At times, money was very tight. We never chose bankruptcy but were close at least twice. We were raising three kids and they knew when we were having financial difficulty, they could feel the tension in the house. But I always knew Lloyd would find something else.”
With $23 million in the bank, the Eckers indulged in a hankering to know more about Sophie Tucker, a Russian-born American Jewish singer, comedian and actress. For four years, they pored through archival research and landed interviews with luminaries like Barbara Walters, Tony Bennet and Carol Channing. They conducted more than eighty interviews. They were able to trace the singer’s life and career through scrapbooks and diaries and other archival documents at the New York Public Library and Brandeis.
The feature-length film, The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, premiered in 2014 at Rockland Community College and has since screened in scores of Jewish Film festivals. It is available on Amazon Prime. The Eckers are hoping to get the story on Broadway one day.
Nothing seems impossible for the Eckers, who work tirelessly to turn dreams into reality. Luckily, with the Snorinator, Lloyd has more time to dream, now that he can get a good night of sleep.
