Snoring brings dream of success

New entrepreneur Phillipa James tells us it was all about keeping it in the family when she found an anti-snoring product which gave other people a good night’s sleep and her the opportunity of starting her own business

Breathing Relief is an anti-snoring dilator I’ve been developing a market for. It’s a product my father invented because he couldn’t find anything that gave him any relief from snoring.

My father was a product designer. Experience had taught him that snoring can have quite an impact if, for instance, you’re not able to sleep in the same rooom as your partner. After he’d designed it, I took up the idea, packaged it and brought it to market.

We started out selling it to independents – health food shops, practitioners and so on.

Clinical trials have been done on it with people who have problems snoring and they’ve had great results.

I was very into having a product that was British and that didn’t use up too many resources. Then I decided I didn’t want to go with a big retailer. We found we had the same mission and values as Waitrose, so that seemed like a good place to go.

I’ve got eight years’ experience working in the marketing sector, mostly in the technology industry, but I’ve also worked in the medical and educational sectors a little bit. I’m a chartered marketer as well.

I’ve always wanted to run my own business: it’s been my dream. I’ve had a lot of obstacles and challenges, but I think I was very lucky with what I fell into.

I’ve met a whole lot of network­ing groups, with mixed results. Lots of people will say they’re going to do things and take you places, but it never happens.

One of the hardest things for me is producing press releases because my biggest area of difficulty is writing. I know what I want to say, but I can’t necessarily format it right and get it in the right order.

Business plans were also an absolute nightmare. For a whole year I was planning things and trying to get them onto a spreadsheet. In the end I decided to do it all in Powerpoint, which everyone’s completely accepted.

For the future I’d like to create this British brand and export it. But any product we do has to help people. I just couldn’t market a product I didn’t believe in.

• Phillipa James was talking to Ian Macrae.

•• More information about Phillipa and the Breathing Relief anti-snoring device at breathingrelief.com