How we made Veer earplugs for work in a noisy office while everyone worked from home
Hello everyone! I am Lisa from River LLC. And here’s our story and a new product announcement at the same time.
A year ago I joined an insane brand new project named «River». It is an incubator for B2C startup gadgets that solve old problems by inventing more modern and better solutions.
Gadget start-ups are way more challenging than launching soft projects, and I still think that our undertaking is bonkers, despite some initial progress. The rest of the team feels the same way, and that is why we have not revealed ourselves to the media or talked about the project in public.
It took some bumps and bruises during the year, but we have developed a process for launching gadgets from the initial idea to production. Broadly speaking, it comes down to a constant generation of product ideas that fit our criteria, evaluation of their market and technical risks, and business model design.
If everything is ok, we create renders and show them to a target audience. If consumer interest in the product is confirmed, we make prototypes to test the main product’s attributes and to ensure that the target audience’s expectations are met. Then we analyze feedback and improve the product concept, then test it again (x NN iterations), and only after finalizing the concept do we produce the first batch of units.
It takes a lot of time and effort, but, to a certain extent, protects us from investing our resources in developing solutions that no one needs.
Our first invention that went all the way through from idea to the production of the first batch is Veer earplugs with volume control.
About Veer earplugs
Veer earplugs are designed for people who struggle with ambient noise problems. And, above all, for people who work in an open space and where constant background noise affects their performance.
Compared with regular foam or silicone earplugs, Veer allows the control of noise cancellation within the range of 5 to 40 dBA. The noise cancellation controller is made to eliminate the necessity of taking the earplugs out when a user needs to hear sounds and words properly and to adjust the required level of noise cancellation.
Compared with noise-canceling earbuds, Veer earplugs do not require charging and can be washed with soap. And Veer earplugs are also mostly cheaper and reduce surrounding noise better. :)
How the idea was born
Our company’s office is always noisy: 3D printers operating, people walking around, kettles boiling, phones ringing, sounds of saws, cutters, compressors, it’s a right din.
So the part of our team, which at the moment is engaged in brainwork, struggles to focus on a task: noise is very distractive, you have to pick yourself up to get back to the mindflow — and it is exhausting.
Some members of the River team used to wear regular earplugs that could be easily purchased in any local pharmacy, but they were not very convenient for work in the office: every time you needed to talk or hear someone, you had to take the earplugs out and then put them back afterward. And that’s inconvenient. Besides, foam or silicone earplugs make you feel as if you are inside a seashell. And that’s annoying.
One day, during brainstorming we got the idea to create earplugs that would be perfect for office work. Having searched for existing solutions we found that the idea was not innovative. Several similar projects had already launched on Kickstarter. But neither of them had been brought to reality and become available on the market — most crowdfunding projects remain dreams. So we started the development.
About the problem and existing solutions
In 2010, the University of Wales Institute proved during their study that complex and non-monotonous tasks are best performed in silence. 58% of employees say they need silence for work. A study from the BBC notes that people working in open spaces are 15% less productive because of difficulty with concentration.
Many people resort to music, but some experts believe that it’s a bad solution for brain work and they even explain why. According to WHO, eight hours of exposure to sound exceeding 85 dBA correlates to hearing impairment. While the average ambient noise level in open spaces is between 70–80 dBA.
We interviewed some open space employees, and they confirmed that the problem existed. Many preferred working in silence, without music, but almost none of them used regular earplugs. And the reason for almost half of the segment it was the same problem that we faced ourselves.
Noise-canceling earbuds are more frequently used, but the good ones are expensive.
The best result is reached by cumbersome headphones, which are not comfortable to carry.
Some respondents said that active use of noise-canceling earbuds caused dizziness and nausea.
How we solved the problem
Veer earplugs offer passive noise cancellation — without electronics and wires. It is reached by vacuum integrity and selection of materials. A special mechanism inside a Veer earplug’s body allows the change of the aperture (a hole) ratio — and due to this, the noise cancelation level is controlled.
When the hole is closed, earplugs reduce noise nearly as well as the leading (according to our own ranking :)) foam earplugs. That means the earplugs do not create complete silence but make the ambient noise more comfortable to endure and much less harmful.
The earplug construction also includes a sound effuser (like a crater), which retains audibility when the earplug aperture is open. Thanks to this, the open position of the Veer earplug sounds are not blocked, so you do not need to take the earplugs out when you need to talk to someone or answer a phone call.
For interim positions, the noise gets quieter to some degree, which is handy when a conversation takes place in a noisy environment.
When we started testing prototypes with people, we noticed something funny. Everyone who managed to insert Veer correctly (I explain why it’s a big deal below) and rolled the wheel of the noise suppression controller — started smiling at once. The effect is similar to when you scroll a wheel for changing the sound volume on a radio or a tape recorder. That is surprising and makes yousmile too.
We were going to make a video clip of the aha-moments but did not get around it :).
Rival testing
Other brands producing earplugs with volume control are Knops, Dbud, and a few more. None of them received five-star reviews. When developing our product we considered their users’ feedback to make the best product. Now we believe that we’ve managed to achieve the goal, but we wait for the market’s feedback to be certain.
Here you can watch video tests of Knops, AirPods Pro, foam earplugs, Moldex, and Veer.
Foam earplugs reduced noise by about 40 dBA, Veer — 38 dBA, AirPods Pro — 25, and Knops — 20. The difference is salient.
The main technical problem and a high ground decision
Sometimes you reach for a beer and grab a bear! So trouble came out of the left-field: obviously, an earplug must be easy to insert, perfectly pressurized, fit any ear and be comfortable when worn for a long time.
And it turned out that people’s ear canals can be different from each other, and not only in diameter but also in shape. And I won’teven mention the variety of sizes and shapes of ear canals of different people.
We’ve developed groovy silicone ear tips, but it cost us a superhuman effort and a heavy price.
If you try to insert an earplug without knowing exactly how to do it properly — the miracle won’t happen: it will most likely feel uncomfortable to wear and won’t work.
To make it work well you need to first select the proper ear tip’s size and its position on an earplug body. We accepted this nuance by almost unanimous consent, as the comfort of long-term wearing is obviously the most important aspect, before any other difficulty that might arise from the first use.
After releasing the first batch, we are going to get back to this issue and aspire to invent a pneumatic super-ear tip the world’s never seen before, but until that happens we have put four different sizes of ear tips and a “how-to-insert” guide in shipping boxes and hope nobody will judge the product without having read the guide (ha-ha).
Our current stage
We are currently collecting pre-orders and waiting for the first batch of units to arrive.
It is expected to be ready for shipment to customers in November 2020. The batch size is 1,000 units of earplugs with aluminum bodies. Earplugs from all future batches will be made of plastic:)
I will gladly answer any of your questions and read your feedback, feel free to joke in comments.
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Thank you for reading this till the end!
