When I asked my husband, John, for his first reaction to the word “Snoo,” his shoulders tensed up. It’s a word that defined a particularly vulnerable period for us: the first few months of our son Sam’s life. For the uninitiated, the Snoo is a $1,700 mechanized bassinet that claims to automatically respond to your baby’s fussing with white noise and rocking, movement triggered by your child’s cries. The company that makes the Snoo, Happiest Baby, calls it a “smart sleeper,” and it also funnels data into an app for you to obsess over, if that’s your thing. Essentially, it promises to help your baby sleep safely, and for longer—an enticing offer when you’re running on two hours of sleep and you have no idea what to do with the tiny person you’re supposed to keep safe. Our Snoo cost $128 per month and was rented for four months. (Today, it can be as high as $159.
The Snoo didn’t need instructions from us because in theory it was listening to Sam—but John often slept with one eye open to see how well it was working. I Think it helped Sam sleep longer, but honestly, it’s hard to quantify. We, John and I, felt a sense of security and comfort through the use of technology and data. But is this peace of mind really worth the cost? What is the actual cost of Snoo? Do?
On Sunday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Kate TaylorBusiness Insider’s senior features correspondent discusses how Snoo was sold to parents as a comfort product and whether it lives up to its promises. The following transcript has been edited to make it more concise.
Harvey Karp is the Tom Brady of pediatricians. His 2002 book, The Happiest Baby on BlockThe book was a huge success. He became famous for his “five S’s”, techniques intended to help kids sleep: swaddling, shushing, swinging, side-lying, and sucking, as in sucking on a pacifier. When did Karp start to think about combining the five S’s into a product?
Harvey Karp says that inspiration struck him after he gave a lecture about SIDS [sudden infant death syndrome]. He basically came up with this idea to combine the five S’s with what we think prevents SIDS, which is keeping babies on their back. But, a lot of times babies on their back can’t sleep well. They are very fussy and hate being held. So, this product keeps the baby on their back, but it also kind of swaddles them, shushes them, swings them, uses these five S’s to keep them on their back and actually make them fall asleep.
The Snoo responds to baby’s cries by making white noises or increasing the rocking speed. The bassinet itself is made out of white mesh and wood. It stands on hairpin legs and it wouldn’t look out of place in a modernist furniture store.
It’s like if someone thought, “OK, we’re going to create this trendy couch that everyone’s going to buy from Instagram, but we want to feel super high-tech.” Something I found while researching this is that it’s been displayed in several museums since it was created.
The Snoo is promoted in a number of ways. One is to prevent SIDS. One is a luxury product that celebrities use. Is it not interesting that these are the two opposing forces behind marketing this product?
Marketing has an inherent weirdness. They’ve always said the Snoo was created because they wanted to prevent SIDS and create this life-saving device—but it costs $1,700 if you aren’t doing the rental program. What we do know is that SIDS disproportionately affects those who are not very wealthy, or who don’t have enough money to buy a new product for their baby.
So it’s a weird balancing act that they’ve tried to pull off where they have to say, “This is lifesaving, everyone should have it, insurance maybe should cover it someday.” But on the other hand, they are like, “This is the biggest luxury in the world. Celebrities love it.”
The company does a lot of name-dropping. Celebrities have used Snoo, and there are celebrity investors. From employees, I learned that they had a method whereby they tracked pregnant celebrities and found a way for them to receive free Snoos. Employees would drop them off at their house. It makes sense to want celebrities to do this marketing for you, but when you’re saying that this is a device that should help all children, and probably is most useful for vulnerable children, it’s a hard balance to strike.
The marketing materials are definitely focused on preventing SIDS and on the idea that a Snoo means more sleep—both for the infant and for the parents. What is the evidence?
It is not as conclusive evidence as the marketing materials would have you believe. Happiest Baby’s own study has been published, but it has not been peer-reviewed as a paper. It shows that the baby gets an extra hour of sleep each night. This is what Happiest Baby has found. It can help a baby sleep better. However, we don’t have a ton of independent peer-reviewed studies on this. There’s one that looks at sleep and says that the Snoo decreases fussiness but doesn’t have a definitive outcome on if it makes baby sleep more.
Do you have any evidence that it prevents SIDSs?
Happiest Baby’s own research on this says that it prevents behaviors that contribute to SIDS or other sleep-related deaths. So, parents say, “Oh, if I have the Snoo, I’m less likely to co-sleep,” which is related to infant sleep-related deaths. But that’s kind of the same with any bassinet. If you have to spend a bunch of money on a bassinet, you’re less likely to have the baby in bed with you. Or they say, “Oh, the baby’s more likely to sleep on their back if they have a Snoo”—which is the same for a lot of other products that keep their baby on the back.
The Snoo is considered a luxury product. The Snoo is expensive, even if you rent it. There are add-ons—sleep sacks and swaddles and sheets—that only work with the Snoo. How did you hear from the company about the positioning of the Snoo on the baby market?
It was interesting to see that while many people I spoke with about Happiest Baby had negative comments about the company, many believed that the Snoo could be a real blessing. I believe that some people were uncomfortable with the way it was presented. It was a celebrity-focused, luxury marketing campaign. I talked to some customer service employees who said that it was some employees’ jobs just to deal with influencers and celebrity clients. People were uncomfortable because they received a higher level of service than average customers.
What is Happiest Baby’s company culture?
This company has a genius idea. They’ve been able to see massive success, but if it were run by people who didn’t micromanage the company, did not make employees feel uncomfortable, did not kind of create all of these weird surveillance tactics, they would be able to achieve so much more.
People told me that the office cleaner was taking notes on when people are at their desk and when they’re going to the bathroom. This was an extremely bizarre level of surveillance, which really weighed down people and drove them away from the company. I had one person who said that she was summoned into the cofounder’s office and presented with this list of exactly when she had arrived in the office every morning down to the exact minute and then exactly how long she left for lunch on her 15-minute lunch break.
Glassdoor is a website that allows people to anonymously rate their employers. When there were negative reviews about the company, the founders encouraged workers to write positive reviews about Happiest Babies.
Reviewers are complaining about micromanagement. Then employees claimed that the founders were micromanaging how they responded to this. Even with my article, we reached out for a comment, and instead of immediately addressing those concerns, we got dozens of responses supposedly from current and former employees at Happiest Baby—but the names were all blacked out and we were not given the chance to talk to any of these employees. And then one of the employees who wrote that response reached out to me and said, “Hey, please don’t use a response if you get one from me. I felt like I had to say this company’s great because if I didn’t, I was worried I was going to lose my job.” So it was definitely a feedback loop: When people had a hard time, they had nowhere to go because of the fear of upper management.
What did the company respond to your report?
They denied a lot of the things I’d heard from many, many employees, especially the conclusions that I drew. They provided information from employees about medical issues. They said that concerns over babies who are unable to leave the Snoo or its interference with natural development were incorrect. They said the concerns on the company culture were “factually inaccurate.” On SIDS, they said, “We’ve never claimed to prevent SIDS,” which is interesting—when you read the actual language on the site, you can say maybe it was not explicitly said, but there was some pretty aggressive linkage between the Snoo and SIDS.
I was definitely a complete psycho in the early months of my son’s life. But there is also this thing about technology where we’re so accustomed to letting tech into various parts of our lives now—so at least in 2020 when I had my son, it seemed weirdly natural that tech would be in my baby’s life, too. I’m wondering whether there is some pushback against that ease, and if we’re a little more skeptical in 2023. The Snoo has only been on the market for a short time, and I think American attitudes toward technology have changed a bit. What do you think?
After reporting this out, I don’t think that tech is necessarily a bad thing to introduce into infants’ lives. I think that the Snoo and other devices like it can have a lot of uses, but I do think that it’s good to have some skepticism. There are uses for this, it might help certain babies, but it’s not proven to prevent SIDS. It’s not proven to increase sleep in all children. There are things that we need to remain skeptical of, where we can say, “This can help certain children”—but by allowing this hype to build and build and build, I think it makes it more difficult to understand what kids need and what parents need, and it feeds into these anxieties of, “If I don’t buy this, if I don’t do this, I’m failing my kid.”
I have seen these videos of Harvey Karp—and they’re old, they’re probably late ’90s Harvey Karp—walking in, holding babies, rocking them, shushing up close to their ear really loudly … and it works; they fall asleep like instantaneously. It’s really fascinating to think about the distance between Harvey Karp pediatrician, his hands lovingly cradling a child—the intimacy of that—and then this mechanical bassinet rotating your child back and forth like they are a little astronaut about to blast off.
Karp’s early stuff is almost uncomfortably hands-on when you watch it. It’s so visceral. It’s something that works, but when you’re watching videos of it, it almost feels too intimate or too hands-on to see. It’s a big difference from the very boring Snoo. Karp recognized a real problem. Parents feel isolated all the time. They feel like, “Oh, I can’t turn to other people in my community, my own parents, and have them help in a hands-on way.” Harvey Karp basically said, “Here’s something that can be that extra set of hands. Instead of having grandparents living with you, maybe this is something that you can rely on to do that extra shift as a parent.” He came up with the idea that a baby is in its fourth trimester after it’s born, and it needs that constant, hands-on, really womb-like environment. But instead of encouraging that to continue to be from parents or from caregivers, he’s saying we can have a robot do it. Which isn’t a terrible thing, but it’s a real departure from how he started out.
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