Breaking Through the Traditional: JLab CEO Discusses Vision to Revolutionize the Hearing Aid Market

{Andrew} Hello, everyone, and welcome to This Week in Hearing. I’m excited to have with me for this episode Win Cramer. He’s the CEO of the headphone company JLab. For those of you who aren’t familiar with JLab, they’re one of the top true wireless earphone brands. They’re actually right behind the big mobile phone companies in terms of earphone units shipped. This is an exciting conversation to have because JLab is the first major consumer audio brand to bring Hearing to the forefront. We’re going to get into that in more detail, but first, Win, please tell us a little bit more about yourself.

{Win} Andrew, excited to be here. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. My name is Win Cramer I’m the CEO of JLab. We’re based here just north of San Diego in Carlsbad, California. My background is I was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Went to college at Oklahoma, and after Oklahoma got into computer technology and building gadgets and widgets for a company based in Dallas and kind of worked. My way around the semiconductor industry and the Gadget industry and ended up with JLab and doing some pretty cool things with Bluetooth and Audio products that we’re pretty proud of. And we’ve had a nice run of success, to your point, in terms of units shipped, we’re right behind the phone company based in Northern California.

Well, thanks. It’s great to have this conversation. It’s really exciting because you’re reaching a completely different demographic than the hearing aid companies do. I actually asked Bard, Google’s new AI assistant, to describe your customer base, and this is what Bard said. I’m quoting now. Millennials and Gen Z. These generations are tech savvy and value quality products that are both affordable and stylish. They are also more likely to be active and use earbuds and headphones for a variety of activities such as working out, listening to music, and watching videos. Also, active adults active adults are looking for earbuds and headphones that are comfortable and durable and that can withstand sweat and water. They are also more likely to be interested in features such as noise cancellation and wireless connectivity. So how did Bard do? Ya know I think Bard got the second half of that right with the adults. I think the first half with Gen Z and Millennial is something that we were working on daily to further engage with that audience and give them a product that they appreciate. Okay, terrific. Bard actually properly read your aspirations, too. Yeah, that’s right. Nice job, Google. And I think this is really important because the hearing aid companies, by and large, address a much older demographic, and they market to them in a completely different. Way. And this is what makes it so exciting. Yes, very exciting. JLab really went all in on this. I could see it’s in the CES announcements. You included hearing protection devices and to upcoming OTC hearing aids, and there’s a lot of educational material as well. I was especially impressed that when I went to your website, the hearing protection was prominently featured right on the main page, right up near the top of the main page. So it’s clear you’re serious about raising awareness about hearing conservation and also the importance of addressing hearing loss if you already have it with the OTC hearing aids. So what actually caused you to address hearing conservation and hearing care? How did you come to realize that you could actually make a difference? Great question. And to answer it, I got to go back a little bit. In 2011, maybe 2012, my daughter was in kindergarten, and on her back to school shopping list was required for her to bring a pair of headphones to class. At the time, JLab didn’t sell headphones. We only sold earbuds. Our earbuds didn’t fit inside of her ears. So I bought a competitor’s headphone product and I gave it to her and it didn’t fit her head. So I recognized that I have a headphone company, let’s build a headphone for kids. So we made a smaller headphone that actually fit her head. And while we were ideating this design, we started doing some research about maturing eardrums and how vulnerable eardrums and children can be to loud noises. And there wasn’t a standard in the hearing world, hearing care world, that said, hey, kids should be under X, decibel limit, et cetera. So I went to the toy category and toys in the United States, if you think of a siren on a fire truck, that maximum sound that that siren can be is 85 decibels. And that became kind of our approach. We were going to excuse me, volume limit our kids headphones to 85 decibels to follow the toy standard. When we started doing that and we took it to market, the market fell in love with it, and it made moms comfortable, it made dads comfortable. Kids could hear fine at a max of 85 decibels. And we were doing the right thing. And it took us a while, as we progressed through this, to really understand, well, maybe we can help more than just kids and we can begin to do this across the board. So if we look at our new protect line that you mentioned, we have an adult version, which is an in ear kind of plug style, and we have a children’s version which is more of a Muff style without audio, just simply protection. We had several of our team members here at JLab recently have babies and. When they went to buy hearing protection, they couldn’t find any name brand. In fact, it was, generally speaking, some Chinese knockoff brand that didn’t have any testing behind it. And they just offered a hearing protection solution. And we thought, let’s do this a little bit better. Let’s put the brand behind it, let’s get involved with this and then let’s go big with it across the board. So what you’re not seeing today, in addition to the protection models we offer for kids and the protect model we offer for adults, if you fast forward to the end of 2023, every bluetooth item that JLab ships will identify or notify, you the user that you’re surpassing that 85 decibel limit. And in fact, you’ll be able to lock it at that 85 decibel limit, adult or child, to cap it, to ensure we’re keeping your hearing protected. Now, you can still push through that cap if you so choose, but we think it’s the right thing to do to bring healthy hearing back into the conversation and if I’m being honest, help solve a problem that I think all of the hearing guys created, or all the audio guys created. I’m from a generation where you listen to music as loud as you could for as long as you could, and that’s probably not the wisest thing to do. So we’re going to take a step back from that and do our best to educate and communicate what is healthy hearing. How can we help you continue to enjoy what you’re listening to, but in a healthier way? And then, by the way, to your point on the hearing aid side of things, we’re going to offer some solutions to folks that potentially have never had the opportunity to purchase it, a hearing aid or hearing amplification style product because they’re really unaffordable. So excited to bring all of this to life in the category we call healthy hearing and make it kind of the fourth leg of the table within the JLab ecosystem. Well, I just love everything you said and I want to go to the safe hearing first because I’m of the similar generation you are, and I’ve been wearing these for the last four years strictly because of all the loud music I did when I was younger. And at that time, there was very little education. There wasn’t even effective hearing protection. We tried sticking stuff in our ears when we go see live music, for example. None of it was really there, but nor were we really aware. And the fact that you’re building this kind of awareness, I think is terrific. But I’m going to talk about the earphones a little bit. So how then will a JLab earphone notify people if they’re listening above 85 dB? How will actually work in practice? So two different types. If it’s a model that connects to an app, the app will be able, you’ll be able to set your volume limit. It will ship out of the box at 85, you’ll be able to then kind of slide. The slider across and say, you can now go through this. It’ll give you a beep notification when you hit that 85 decimal. If it’s a product that is not app connected, it will just give you that beep twice, so little hey, beep, beep, and then let you push past it on the volume rocker button on the product itself. So it’s actually phone independent. The models without an app, as I raise the volume on my phone, they earphones themselves. Of course, knowing what input level gives you X dB of output level, when I cross 85 entirely within the earbud, it will notify me with the beeps. Correct. That’s really something. I’m very impressed with that because it isn’t relying on an app. I can be listening with any device, and it will still notify me. That’s right. And we think that’s important, especially with if I look at my mom and dad who aren’t fans of apps on their phones, but they are fans of healthy stuff, this will help them give them an easy audible cue that, hey, maybe I should take a pause here. And is this loud enough? Yeah, absolutely. Well, even a younger person, I’ve got a DAC, for example, and if I wanted to stream with my DAC, I couldn’t run the app if I wanted to. Correct. And so to have it built purely within the Earbud, I think is fantastic. Even if you have the app, at other times, you don’t want to pull the phone out of your pocket. You’re in a crowded Metro car, for example. You can’t get to your phone very quickly, you’ll still get notified. So I really like that. I like that a lot. Thank you. You’ve got passive hearing protection. You’ve got earbuds that will notify you when you’re exceeding 85 DB. And then you also have two over the counter hearing aids. Tell me about those a little bit. Yeah, the over the counter hearing aids, obviously, it’s a new market for the industry was in October of last year kind of the regulation change that allows folks such as JLab and others to bring to market, with an easier FDA approval process, various products to help people hear if they have some hearing loss. So we’re taking a path of two approaches, more of a hearing amplification product that while it will have some app connectivity, if you choose, not a lot of bells and whistles in it outside of amplification and manually adjusting to the environment that you’re within. So with the push of a button of the product, if you’re at a concert, it’ll ship to concert mode. Or if you’re in a Starbucks coffee shop, you can switch it to coffee shop mode. Or if you’re having a conversation like you and I are right now, you can switch it to conversational, but it will give the end use user. Our intention is to go from plus five decibels to plus one. 30 decibels of improvement involved in Amplification in our first OTC hearing aid product, which we believe we can get it to market around $99. That’s our intention. That’s our goal. We believe that that will allow likely a whole new level of user that has never either admitted to or had the money, quite frankly, to help with their hearing loss. And I look at this kind of like reading glasses. If you walk into any pharmacy today and you see the big six foot tall spinner of various reading style glasses that you can pick up without a prescription, right? They’re just meant to help you in your day to day life. My wife wears them. I wear them from time to time, but I don’t need a prescription. That’s the same type of program that we plan to offer with our $99 hearing Amplification product that will be launching Q Three Ish of this year with multiple form factors within. Right. So you showed what you were wearing earlier, Andrew, and you probably have a high dollar hearing aid in your ear today, but it’s a wraparound. People don’t like wraparound. They just want to plug. Some people love wraparound. And then the colorways in between. We’ve had a lot of success really trying to showcase to various demographics that you can match yourself. You can be inspirational in what you’re wearing, you can be louder and prouder, you can be subdued and everything in between. We think we have an opportunity to offer real value to customers that have never asked for it. In our research, there’s 38 million Americans that admit to having some sort of hearing loss that’s just that. Admit it. I’m not one of those, but I know I have it. So I think we’re going to be able to really inspire some folks to take a chance with something that they never thought about before because they’ve been priced out of the market well. And I think there’s actually a lot to unpack there in what you said, and one of them is really the stigma and admitting that you have hearing loss, because even with an OTC solution, you have to recognize you have hearing loss. You have to prepare yourself to be ready to do something about it. And I can sense here that you’re trying to lower that barrier and make it easier for people to try a hearing solution. And I gather then, because you talked about the different color ways and the different ways of people expressing themselves, that you’re going to integrate this into your virtual fitting software so that I can go on the website to see what this OTC hearing aid looks like and choose my color. Is that correct? That’s a great point, Andrew. Thanks for bringing that up. We do have a virtual fitting lab. If you think about a retail store today, you think of the traditional headphone section. You go to that section and you can try on the headphones. And every brand has a little mirror so you can see how you look. You can’t do that with earbuds because it’s frankly pretty gross earbuds out and Gosh knows how many people would be putting them in their years to see how they look. So we’ve taken a virtual approach to this. When you scan a QR code on the front of the box and you can see which product looks best for you, which we like, I think it’s fun and gives users at least a taste of what it could be like. So certainly this will be a big part of our entire solution when it comes to life. Okay. And so the initial model, $99, ish and not self fitting, but you’ll have a selection of pre programs. And what other earbud features will it have? Now, this will be a dual model, so it’ll be a hearing aid plus Bluetooth connectivity. We’re going to make it really simple with a slider switch on the actual case. Do you want it to be in hearing aid mode, or do you want it to be in hearing aid plus, which will include streaming? So if you think of a traditional true wireless, like an Apple AirPod today, that connects to your phone, you can listen to your music, watch a video, take a phone call. That functionality will be all baked into the product if you choose to use it. Or you could use it as just a hearing aid solution as well. You just very easily click the slider across, and it’s amplification based on the environment that you preselect it to be in. Again, that concert mode or conversational, et cetera. So we will have all the bells and whistles of a traditional true wireless earbud with the hearing aid sizzle up or the amplification sizzle up. Okay, so I’m out and about. I want to listen to music. I flip it into earbud mode. I get to a restaurant with my friends. It’s loud, I need some hearing assistance. I flip it into hearing mode, and I’m good to go. And this is all done in hardware. I don’t need the app even? That’s correct. Okay. My 80 year old mother is named Marty, and everything we build has to be Marty proof. That’s how I like to call it. So like I had mentioned earlier, she’s not a fan of apps. She likes hard switches and dials. So that’s what we try to do well, and there’s something to be said for that, even for younger people. I’ll use myself as an example because I’ve got full control over the hearing aids from here. I can make custom programs that works, but it remembers the last app program I used. And so I’ll have it, say, in pub mode. And if I’m going out, I don’t have to whip out my phone to change it. I just touch the button, it goes into that one. I walk. Out of the place, out onto the street, I touched a button again, and it goes into omni mode, and I don’t have to worry about the app, but when I want to, it’s there. So I think that sort of design thinking is appropriate for everybody, not necessarily just for older people. Yeah, fair statement. So tell me about the other one, the next one that’s coming. Is that a self fitting hearing aid, then? Yeah, the second model, which we were shooting for four, it could roll into Q1 based on some preliminary testing. But this will be a self fitting model that goes through a host of tests. If you can remember being in elementary school and you had the Beat test to see how your left ear can hear what frequencies you click the button, so to speak. The next model will be a full solution that really adjusts to the frequencies in which you’re deficient and elevate said frequencies to make you less deficient based on buttons that you click and the tests that you take. Now, you’ll be able to override any of that, of course, but this will be a full solution that is referred to as self fitting. I think self fitting is often misunderstood. You think of self fitting and you think of how does it actually physically fit in your ear? But the definition in the FDA’s mind is really, how does it virtually reconnect kind of the dots on the hearing frequencies in which you’re deficient. So we’re doing a lot of work to make sure we have the frequencies right, that we have the test right, but that it’s simple to use. I think that’s the problem with all of this stuff is it’s so easy for people like me who’ve been in tech forever, to make it so complex, because it makes sense to me, but it’s got to make sense to everyone. And I’m not using the term dumb it down, because that’s very unfair. But just keep it simple. Bells and whistles are great unless there’s so many that you get frustrated and you return it. So we’re doing a lot of work ensuring that everything is easy, simple, and educational as you go through the process so that you have a good experience. And then staffing behind the scenes is something that we need to talk about. JLab, on average a day, sells 35,000 earbuds a day. 35,000 a day. I want to interrupt you for a moment for people listening to this podcast to understand the scale of the consumer electronics business. Because when a company like yours comes into the hearing space, it’s just a completely different level than hearing aid companies who are selling 20 million devices, in other words, 10 million people getting fit. It a year. So I think that’s important to understand. It is important. And if our thesis is correct, that there’s more people than we believe that are hearing deficient and that have never had an opportunity to be fitted by an audiologist. I won’t unpacking what I just said for a second, but I just want to hit on this. We’re not trying to compete with the GN Nords of the world. We’re not trying to remove the audiologist from the equation. We want to bring people in at an affordable price point and then have them recognize, gosh, what if I go up? What happens next? Can I have even better experience at $1,000, $2,000, $3,000? How could I further help myself? But we’re bringing this product to the masses in a way that’s never been done before and hopefully giving them such an awesome experience that they’re willing to actually let me go to the audiologist and find out what’s really going on, because, gosh, this could be incredible. I could change my life. So that is the intention. But back to what I was saying. We have to ensure that we are able to support the mass and the scale that we believe will follow with the launch of these two products. And that’s why insurance staffing is correct that we have easy ways to contact us, that you can contact us on your terms, not ours. So over a phone, over a video, over text, over chat, that’s really important to all of this because people are going to need some help as we get into this. It’s going to be new to them and new to us. So we need to ensure that we have the team and the experience dialed before we bring these to market. Okay, that’s a really good question for me to ask is what kind of after sale service do you anticipate providing as these products come to market? Let’s say I’m an inexperienced person. I have some mild hearing loss. I’m ready to try your solution. I buy the OTC hearing aid. What kind of support do I get afterwards? Yeah. So there will be two paths to purchase Andrew. The first path being online. If it’s online, we don’t want the response to be reactive from JLab. We want it to be proactive from JLab. Hey, we know you bought these. Here’s the most common opportunities that you can know upfront before you get them. So you have some wherewithal when you get the box in the mail and maybe you’ve gone through a couple of steps, so you know, hey, this is coming. So we want to be proactive in that regard. The second is reactive. So somebody buys it at a Walmart or a Target or. Best Buy, they bring it home, they put them in their ears, and nothing happens. How can we help engage that customer quickly and on their time? Most likely they’re going to buy this on a Saturday morning when we’re usually not staffed, but we need to ensure that we’ve switched that gear so we are staffed on a Saturday morning to help get that customer up and running. Traditionally, it’s how do we connect these to our phone? That’s the number one question anybody asks when it comes to Bluetooth earbuds tomorrow. Once we have a hearing aid product, it’s probably going to be, how do I know what volume I should set this to? Do I need to be at five decibels or 30 decibels? What mode should I be in? Oh, by the way, these also connect to my phone. How the heck do I do that? So having both paths dialed proactive and the reactive path to ensure we’re supporting the customer at their point of purchase. Okay, I think that’s really good because I’ve seen pitfalls, for example, even questions about how do I know they’re fitting properly, physically fitting properly? And of course, everybody’s bugaboo is Bluetooth pairing. Right? Number one, everybody will say that. But I also like your approach to the hearing journey, because I can tell you, once you get into severe territory, there’s no beating going to an audiologist because you have to juggle a lot of different things. Okay. It’s not just a simple matter of amplification. In fact, I ended up having to have the compression settings tweaked in certain frequency bands because of the way my own hearing was damaged. That’s the sort of thing only a professional can do. So I like the idea, though, of giving people the means and thinking about starting their hearing journey sooner. So a person with milder loss starts with a solution like yours, and if they end up getting more severe hearing loss, they are now already they’ve got a solution that works. Even if now they’re getting outside the range where that solution is optimum, they become comfortable with the idea of addressing your hearing and they’re more willing to go see a professional. So I see it like you, I don’t think OTC is a threat to professional audiologists or other hearing care professionals. My optimistic view is it brings more people who need treatment in sooner and therefore will help people at every stage of their journey. So I’m glad to hear you’re the same mind as I am. I think it’s just the market Andrew, if I’m being honest. I’ve been talking with people and I’ll again go back to glasses and how I really think this parallels glasses are just commonplace now. Nobody thinks negatively or down. We had the four eyes conversation when I was a kid right? But you don’t hear that anymore. That doesn’t exist. That moniker is gone. It. And there’s a lens crafters on every corner because people are visually impaired. I believe that we’re going to understand as a society that we have a lot more hearing impaired people than we believe. And there’s going to be not a lens crafters, but a hearing crafters on every other corner to help support this with OTC solutions, with an audio that can custom fit products for you and educate you and everything in between from styles and colors and footprints, just like you would have at a LensCrafters. That’s how we see the future. And eventually all of this stuff is going to combine, right? This is going to be you’re buying your audio product to help make your life better. It can do amplification if you need it, it can do translation if you need it. All of these factors from tech are going to come together in the next decade and provide us some solutions as a society that we’ve only read about. It’s going to be a really neat journey over the next decade. It is going to be an exciting journey. And in line with that, how do you see the future of hearing devices? Well, earbuds in general, is hearing and lifestyle converge. Like, put yourself in your place five or ten years from now, what does a JLab ear bud look like and what features does it have? I think everybody will be wearing a hearing device in the future. Heck, everyone’s almost wearing a hearing device today. I see a lot of people walking around with AirPods in their ears more than I don’t, but I think the devices will be smart enough to adjust on the fly for what you need. So are you at a concert? They need to be in some sort of protect mode, so that happens. Are you in a noisy setting? You can be in a concentrate mode. Are you in I go to Asia a lot. Might a setting with an individual that doesn’t speak English. And now that translation is happening on the fly, which is really close. The tech is out there. We just need the delivery mechanism with a battery life that can go eight plus hours to make it a reality. And that’s coming. So I do see this convergence of lifestyle and health happening and I think it’s going to be you wake up in the morning just like you would put your glasses on or put your watch on, you’re going to put these in and go about your day. But Andrew, you know better than anyone, bluetooth LE, which is coming to market this year, but likely won’t be it won’t really matter the market for another 24 months. But imagine you’re in an airport and there’s 24 televisions across the monitor and you want to listen to number 20 and you can wire that to your earbuds. That’s a pretty powerful statement. And. All of that tech coming to life and being personalized for you. The individual versus everybody in the environment is pretty deep. Yeah, absolutely. I’m waiting with baited breath for Auracast the use case I’m sure I’m going to try first is the sports bar when I want to hear the audio from the match that’s over there somewhere. It’s going to be great. Now is in talking about accessibility of the hearing solutions. There’s a lot of conversation in the hearing care community right now about the lack of an uneven distribution of hearing care professionals. You can look at a map of the United States, and there are many counties that don’t even have a hearing care professional in them. So how actually do you intend to reach the broader audience? And besides having units on your website and in the local Walmart, how actually are you going to reach the broader audience and they’re going to become aware of your hearing protection, your educational materials and your OTC hearing aids? Well, we’re blessed in that we have very good global distribution, and we’re going to rely on our brick and mortar retail partners to help tell this story for us. And they’re eager to do so. This is a market they want to participate in. They believe they have the platform that they can educate and ultimately transform a customer’s journey with a product such as this. So we certainly will rely on the Walmarts, the targets, the best buys, the costco’s of the world to help tell this story. And I think that’s a dynamic story that we’re going to tell. Does it happen in the audio section? Does it happen in the pharmacy section? Does it a whole new healthy section come to life? Like Vitamins has come to life in many stores over the past ten years. I think that’s dynamic and we’ll watch that evolve. But I’m also a firm believer in the free market, and I’m a firm believer that there’s going to be very smart people that see this change happening. And you’re not going to have audiologists now in just Scottsdale and Florida. You’re going to have them everywhere because this market has been created and it’s helping people, and they can make money by doing it. And I think it’s going to come quicker than people imagine now that people like JLab and we certainly won’t be the only one. And I love competition. It makes us all better that professionals will want to join this business, and it won’t be as disjointed or fragmented as it is today. We see that path changing pretty quick. Okay, so you envision more of a continuum of care, and so starting with entry level devices like your first OTC, going all the way through to full on hearing aids and. And even your hope is that hearing care professionals will come on board and offer the full suite of solutions as well. Well, and ultimately, for us and being a little bit selfish here, ultimately we want to take imprints of folks ears so we can give them the perfect product. It fits them perfectly. We know their preset settings that they like. You know, the the inside of an ear, the shape of it doesn’t change as you age. That’s a big misconception. It changes as you gain or lose weight, but as you age, that imprint inside remains the same. And if we had a path where folks could have that imprint on file anywhere, almost like a retainer, you could really give somebody personal, customized support on the fly. That’s pretty cool. Okay, so are you talking strictly about physical fit to the earbud or all? Regardless, I’m certainly talking the imprint. I’m referring to a custom physical fit, varied with that sound profile, that audio profile that is unique to you. Okay, got it. That’s really an exciting path forward, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the devices as they roll out. I salute JLab for taking this approach and trying to reach the mass market, people who are not getting the message about hearing loss prevention and hearing loss care and the importance of addressing your hearing loss. So that’s really excellent. And again, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. Does the devices all come online? Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap it up? I certainly just want to say thank you, Andrew, for giving me a platform to help educate and communicate. My only message would be, take care and listen to what your body is telling you, especially your ears. I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice in the times that we live in, listening to stuff for too loud for too long, and we have a way to protect ourselves, and we should. We take care of our eyes, we take care of our bodies. We’ve done a bad job with our ears, and I think we have some easy ways to do that. And it’s about education. It’s about teaching and helping people understand that there are ways that you can better take care of yourself. And I’m excited to hopefully be the tip of that spear to help communicate that message and get other folks on board as well, because I think we can really help a lot of people. Well, I’m really looking forward to watching you do that as all this rolls out. So. Thanks, Win. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today. And thanks, everyone, for listening to this week in hearing.