In 1999, back in the last century, we were racking our brains for a workable solution to the sleep and relationship problems caused by loud snoring. Customers would call us begging for solutions to their problem: when your bed partner snores, how can you ever get any sleep?

For many couples, snoring has become a serious, long-term problem. We have listened empathetically to hundreds of desperate couples who have told us about the way snoring drove them apart, and we have heard from desperate newlyweds who have just learned that they have entered a life of snoring-plagued nights and groggy days. Often, in partnerships in which one or both individuals snore, the problem goes far beyond simple annoyance. His snoring will wake her up; she will jab him in the ribs, waking him up--and as soon as they fall asleep again, the snoring starts again, and the process is repeated throughout the night. Tensions rise, and all too often harsh words are exchanged, leaving both parties too angry to get back to sleep. In the end, no one gets the rest they so drastically need, and as a consequence, people and relationships suffer.

We have heard from snoring sufferers who have spent literally decades sleeping apart, despite surgery, chin straps, special pillows, breathing strips, and outrageously expensive food supplements that are supposed to cure snoring--all to no avail. And married couples aren't the only sufferers; there are many other night-noises that, like snoring, can cause serious sleeping problems. We have listened to college students complain about loud roommates and nocturnal neighbors making it impossible to sleep the night before exams; we have talked with urban apartment-dwellers who suffer from squealing pipes, traffic noises, and car alarms. We have even heard from widows who are suffering from the snoring of their beloved pet dogs or cats, on whom they rely for companionship, but whose snoring keeps them in a constant state of sleep deprivation!

Late in 1999, we developed a "Snoring Relief Kit," a package containing several different kinds of earplugs to help snoring-sufferers find just the right plugs. While earplugs could sometimes do the job, those who told us of their problem with particularly loud snoring made it clear to us that no ear plug could block enough noise to help. Once we understood the problem--that snoring is often just too loud to be adequately blocked by an ear plug alone--we looked for more options. That brought us to white noise. Later that year, we began offering white noise machines, and later still we added white noise CDs, all of which are a great help for some, but again, while white noise works great for ordinary night noises, it still wasn't a solution for loud snoring. Even moderate snoring can be more than twice as loud as white noise machines set on maximum volume. To block the loudest snoring, the white noise would have to be played at a dangerous volume--a volume so high, in fact, that it would damage your hearing! Clearly, noise masking alone could not solve the snoring problems suffered by our most desperate customers.

One day, in a conversation with one woman who had suffered from snoring for years, it dawned on us that maybe we could somehow combine the benefits of an ear plug to block the snoring with the benefits of white noise to mask the snoring. If only we could put white noise right into the ear, on the inside of the earplug, a small, safe amount of white noise could drown out the snoring noises that the ear plug could not filter out. We immediately began the search for an in-ear personal white noise machine, one that could bridge the gap left by earplugs and white noise machines, one that could protect sleepers from loud, disturbing sounds. We found nothing.

Months went by, and customers kept calling, some merely annoyed, others dangerously close to the breaking point. We still had no solution--until one day when, out of the blue, a sales rep called to pitch us a hunter's hearing aid. During our conversation, we asked the guy if he could make us an in-ear white noise machine, and he said that his company had in fact developed just such a device, but that they had had very little luck selling them. Nobody knew what the device was really good for, and nobody was looking for that kind of product... until us. We brought that product (called the Sleep-Eze) to our customers in the year 2001, and it met with immediate demand. Over the past several years we have sold thousands of these little "marriage savers," and we continue to sell them today. But there's still a problem: the Sleep-Eze will only work for about 60% of the people who try it. The device is just not comfortable enough for many people to sleep on, and, too, the silicone tips on the Sleep-Eze just don't block enough noise to work for really loud snoring. Still, we knew that we were on the right track, because the people who bought the Sleep-Eze and found that it solved their snoring problem became fanatically loyal to the product, sending us delighted emails about how they were finally getting the sleep they'd missed out on for so long. But for many others, it was just not the right product; it needed serious tweaking. We continued our search.

In 2004 we met with a manufacturer located near London, England who brought us the Unifit technology currently employed in the SnoreMasker^TM Pro. The Unifit technology provided a white noise generator that was smaller and more compact than the Sleep-Eze.  Unifit solved the comfort problem perfectly, but we still could not make it work: as it turned out, the available Unifit tips wouldn't fit most people, and couldn't block a sufficient amount of sound.

In June, 2006, we finally found the perfect solution in the marriage of the Comply Snap-Tip technology to the Unifit generators. The result is the SnoreMasker^® Pro, which is comfortable and effective enough at both blocking sound and masking unwanted noise to actually solve the snoring problem. This is the perfect solution we have been seeking for the past seven years! To find that solution, it took listening to our customers, then coming up with a theoretical solution that would really solve the problem, then rooting out the right set of technologies, and then finally putting them all together. The result? The right product for the right problem.

If you are one of the 30,000,000 people in the US who regularly have trouble sleeping, and if your problem is too much noise in your environment--whether it is fire trucks passing in the night, dogs barking next door, the TV blaring from the apartment one over, or the snoring of your bed partner--you now can get a solution that is guaranteed to work for you. After years of research and development, we are very excited and pleased (to say the least!) to be able to bring this terrific new solution to you.

You don't have to live with snoring and sleepless nights any more. Please, help us spread the word! You are not alone in your suffering, and you don't have to be alone in experiencing the solution, now finally available in the SnoreMasker^® Pro.