Hello, I am Laurie James, inventor of Breathing Relief, and this is my invention story.
Laurie James a Ford trained product designer from Essex suffered with terrible snoring and sleep apnoea. He tried all of the apparatus on the market to try to control his snoring and nothing worked. Finally he had two operations, one to remove his adenoids and one to cut his soft palate but neither worked. He was not happy using a C-pap machine every night as at that time he travelled a lot and he also found it quite intrusive. After his second marriage broke down he decided to design his own device to stop snoring as his methodical mind worked out that the snoring was due to the obstruction in his nose where his nostrils collapsed.
Laurie spent 8 years and over £250,000 working with an Ear Nose and Throat specialist and an injection mouldings specialist determined to find the cure to his problem until he came up with the product that we now have today. The high cost is due to the tooling which is very expensive and many tools had to be made for previous designs which when tested, did not work as effectively until the final design was found that did. 

Mr James then ran clinical trials with the ENT doctor to prove the effect that the product had on reducing and eliminating snoring. In 2007, once the design had been proven a success, Laurie patented it. Unfortunately retired Laurie had little experience with products and marketing having run a service based car design company for many years and as the recession was hitting, he had no idea how to take the product to market.

In 2009 Mr James’ daughter Phillipa James decided she would research into whether there was a market for this type of product. Phillipa by then had completed a degree in Business and Marketing and had acquired 8 years of marketing industry experience. In 2010 after finding there was a market for the product Phillipa left her full time employment and invested further in the product to take it to market. She started by selling through independent resellers, practitioners and at trade events. What she didn’t expect to find was that not only was there a market but the feedback she was getting showed that due to a better night’s sleep customers were claiming that they had lost weight on the product and that it also helped during exercise. 

Phillipa decided to rebrand the product using the design agency Milestone to help to match its multi-purpose uses and to relaunch into more retailers. Although Phillipa had a background in Marketing, she had only minimal experience in sales and was not so used to pitching. Added to that Phillipa is dyslexic and sometimes finds it hard to work without a structure. She contacted Leonard Cheshire disability and one of their consultants-David McDermot helped Phillipa with a strategy for pitching which she used to pitch to Waitrose and was able to get the product in there. Another of Phillipa’s concerns was the ever evolving business plan where she seemed to have a mental block. Finally after months of ‘putting it off’ Phillipa attended an executive summary event at the British Library run by Paul Grant of the Funding Game. Inspired by her very focused Executive Summary she then decided to scrap the standard word document style business plan and write her business plan as a power point presentation. This style of business plan was much easier to read and later she was able to obtain funding from an investor to move the company forward more quickly. 

While there are still many obstacles Phillipa is currently refreshing the website and getting ready for the company’s next campaign which will be far more focused to all of the customers that may benefit from the product so sports enthusiasts as well as snorers.

 

“Both my father and I have put all of our savings into this product because we believe it works. Despite the obstacles, when we receive feedback from customers saying how it has changed their life we know that it is all worth it.” Breathing Relief™ currently sells through Waitrose and The Health Store into independent Heath Stores as well as in Independent Pharmacy chains and with practitioners. 

More information about Breathing Relief can be found at www.breathingrelief.com and breathingrelief.blogspot.com.