Jury Awards $95 Million in Water Bed Design Suit

A federal court jury in Orange County found that a Los Angeles mattress company had conspired to steal a tubular water bed design, and it awarded $95 million Friday to a Kansas City firm.

The judgment against Somma Mattress Co. and its owner, Angel M. Echevarria, came after a two-day trial on a lawsuit brought by General Bedding Corp.

Somma and Echevarria will attack the judgment in post-trial motions, said its lawyer, James B. Andres of Newport Beach. He called the lawsuit “contrived” and argued that a General Bedding director, Frederick Brandau, defrauded his own firm. Brandau, who now lives in Florida, did not defend himself and was found to be liable along with Somma and Echevarria.

The award ends a chapter in the long water bed wars that Somma itself began in the mid-1980s when it started suing Southern California companies for infringing on its water bed patent. Somma had been one of the nation’s biggest water bed manufacturers, registering sales of $53 million in 1988 alone.

The origins of the patent, however, became suspect in the late 1980s when E&S; Vinyl Manufacturing in Santa Ana and two other Orange County bedding companies began checking into it after they were sued by Somma.

E&S; won a defense verdict in 1989, halting the Somma litigation efforts, said General Bedding’s lawyer, Mark A. Schadrack of Irvine.

Pretrial investigations had led E&S; and the other two firms to Kansas City, where General Bedding had become inactive. Its primary owners had been working in other fields since closing the company’s doors in the late 1970s and knew nothing about Somma’s success and Brandau’s alleged involvement.

“General Bedding developed a tubular water bed, which was a revolutionary product at the time,” Schadrack said. But the company had little money and sent the inventor, Brandau, to Echevarria to propose a joint venture project, he said.

“Brandau told General Bedding executives that the project wasn’t going to work, that it was a dead deal,” Schadrack said. “But what they didn’t know was that he already had reached agreement with Angel to go forward with the product at Somma. Together, they obtained a patent under Echevarria’s name.”

But Andres, who had represented E&S; against Somma, said he will attack the judgment on the grounds that, if fraud existed, it was on the part of Brandau. By law, General Bedding can’t benefit from the fraud of one of its agents, the attorney said.