Booming business means further expansion, no rest for East L.A. mattress manufacturer.

Booming business means further expansion, no rest for East L.A. mattress manufacturer Angel M. "Angie" Echevarria is looking to augment his 240,000-square-foot mattress manufacturing plant in East Los Angeles with another 100,000 square feet. Although the facility on Union Pacific Avenue may be the nation's largest single mattress manufacturing plant, Echevarria says, his 1985 expansion was not enough to accommodate continued strong growth.

Indeed, Echevarria says Somma Mattress Co. is the "largest Hispanic company in growth in California and 10th in the nation."

Sales, he reports, sprang from $3.5 million in 1981 to $34 million last year. Echevarria projects $50 million this year, $80 million in three years.

The company currently employs 275 workers, a 20-percent increase so far this year. Beside the local plant, the company has 25 warehouses across the country.

Things have not always gone so smoothly for Echevarria, now 59, who was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, and moved to New York at age 5. He left the Big Apple at 27 to become plant manager for a quiting company in Minneapolis only to discover winter there was no place for a native Puerto Rican.

In 1960 he was offered a job by another quiting company in Los Angeles and by 1966 was ready to go into business for himself. Borrowing $25,000 from a friend and another $10,000 from his step-mother, he began his own business here as a quilter and a fabricator of polyurethane foam for the garment and bedding trades.

Being a vendor to those trades is a lumpy business filled with starts and stops, Echevarria learned to his dismay. At one point, he recalls, his accountant warned he should consider filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Managing to gbet a U.S. Small Business Administration loan for $150,000 to rebuild working capital, Echevarria was able to get his own vendors "appeased." Still, getting new credit was difficult.

Years ago, while still vending to other mattress manufacturers, Echevarria produced foam "topper pads" to go over the tops of waterbeds. Then he started quilting the pads na dlater gave them skirts.

Observing how many entrepreneurs were making a go of it in the young waterbed industry, "despite lots of bedding failures (leaks)," Echevarria figured it could be his escape from the vagaries of a venfor's livlihood. Instead of a water-filled mattress, he invented a new type of waterbed that would be less prone to leaks by having 11-inch-diameter plastic cylinders, 55 inches long, filled with water, with seven such cylinders in a queen-size bed.

To get the new project off the ground, though, he needed fresh financing. Unable to get a commercial loan, Echevarria took out a new loan on his home.

"When I introduced my 'Somma' (waterbed) mattress in 1978, people thought I was foolish," he recalls. "But now at least 14 manufacturers are duplicating it," he mutters, "even though we spent $750,000 last year on attorney fees trying to protect our patent rights"

The Somma mattress did prove Echevarria's ticket out of vending to other manufacturers. Last year he liquidated his foam and quilting businesses to free up 60,000 square feet in the plant to increase Somma mattress production capacity.

But Echevarria remains particularly sensitive to the problems of vendors and is especially appreciative of how many have helped him. On Sept. 18 he gave a "black tie optional" banquet at the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel to honor representatives of his 115 vendors whom he called "the secret of our success."

They range from a small janitorial service to the giant DuPont Co. and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, of which he became a commissioner in 1984. One purpose of the banquet was to advise the vendors of Echevarria's growth plan because they "need to be involved" so they can prepare for it. For example, Echevarria just disclosed his introduction of a foam mattress to fill a niche in his product line. He also says he is not ruling out an innerspring mattress "because we're in the sleep, not waterbed, business."

Another purpose of the banquet was to thank the vendors for their help and to give special awards to certain vendors whose help was "above and beyond." An electrical contractor, for example, was singled out for hooking up Echevarria's equipment overnight when problems delayed the company's move from four locations to the new plant.

Although Echevarria confides he was nervous about the evening for the vendors, whom he calls his "loyal partners," the company is very much a family affair. His son Michael, 35, is executive vice president and chief operating officer; another son, Robert, 30, is in marketing and sales; and a daughter is involved in special projects for the company while raising two daughters of her own.