 Listen is a new audio company that started in 2013. They make headphones with hand-made wooden backs, and they spend a portion of the revenue helping charities buy hearing aids for people who can't afford them. That sort of social mission used to be rare, but it's becoming more common in something called social enterprise. And in a world where most startups fail, it creates even more challenges for young companies trying to get off the ground. So can a company like Listen actually survive and compete with giants like Beats and Bose when they're spending money on social causes instead of billboards? So I was working in the music industry, and I was here in Los Angeles. At the time I was like really into all of these social enterprise companies like Toms or Warby Parker that had just started, and I realized that there was nothing music-related in social enterprise. Coincidentally at the same time I saw a video of a woman hearing for the first time. It was just a really great lightbulb moment of like, oh this is what I want to do with my life. So basing a brand on social entrepreneurship, it's tricky. It's a tricky prospect. Listen is an audio company that makes high quality headphones and speakers out of real wood. We actually started the company to fund a charity called Starkey Hearing Foundation. For every purchase that somebody makes, they're also helping somebody hear for the first time. Is it possible for a brand like Listen to take on this huge monster like Beats? No, it's not. The headphone market is crazy now. It's something like a $10 billion industry a year, and it's growing. Essentially headphones, I mean it's just shorthand for like, look, you know, I'm cool. I don't think that's the game they're going to win. No, they're never going to have 90% of the market share, and Beats is always going to be the monster in the room or whatever comes next that's hugely funded. Getting into big box retail has definitely been a struggle for us so far. Somewhere like a Target or a Best Buy, Beats and Bose collectively probably have 80 to 90% of the real estate in the store. So all of the other brands are competing for that 10 to 20% in the store, which is a very tough fight, but it's worth fighting. When we started, we had no capital. It was just me and my apartment and trying to figure out how to make a prototype of headphones from basically nothing. I took $10,000 loan from a friend and basically went to China and worked with this factory that I had found on Alibaba. I tried to do Kickstarter, but they actually denied us because we had a charitable part of our company. Built a simple website on Shopify, took some photos of the only pair of headphones that we had. Some producer from the Today Show had actually seen it somehow. They ended up putting it on the show and then tons of people went to the website and ordered, but we didn't have any stock. We literally just had one pair of headphones. So that was quite an experience. They had to wait quite a long time, longer than they were expecting. So we ended up having to talk to every single customer. And then when they finally came in, we wrote handwritten sorry notes basically to all of them. The biggest early challenge Listen faced was scaling up. They'd made one pair of headphones and had consumer demand, but now they needed to start manufacturing at scale, finding retail partners, and actually selling headphones to customers. I met Joe around the same time that I actually got introduced to him through a mutual friend. It was kind of a perfect match between my marketing and music background and with his logistics and social enterprise background. I started a small little clothing company with a friend of mine. Some friends asked if we would help ship their product out of that space, and we said sure, of course. We've got to help our friends out. So cut to a few days later, some more friends, hey, I heard you're helping so-and-so do this. One of the brands that we helped launch was Tom's Shoes. That's a big part of also my understanding of social enterprise. We officially launched in April 2013. Definitely a crazy time starting a company. It's very stressful. I didn't sleep very much. There's a huge learning curve. I didn't really know how to manufacture anything or how to get into retail. I think the biggest hurdle in the journey of Listen so far is really just competing with these huge, huge companies, seeing how we can kind of like hack the system with press and with our story. If we had started with something like a speaker or a record player, it wouldn't really have worked because our whole business is based on people telling other people about the story. They Instagram it, they put it on Facebook, they tell their friends, like I just got an awesome product that also helps somebody else. Our first retailer was actually Whole Foods, which is interesting because we were like their first electronics they've ever carried. That following Christmas, we actually got into Nordstrom, probably our biggest account, along with Birchbox and Brookstone. It's been a pretty crazy ride. When you go into a space that's dominated by billion dollar companies with this like, I've got my heart on my sleeve, like we're going to go and save the world, there's a lot to overcome. I think there's been criticism around social enterprise. People don't believe that it's real and then it comes from the heart. It wasn't an afterthought of like, oh, we should do a charitable component. Like this company never would have started without Starkey. The Starkey Foundation travels the world and gives those in need hearing aids. People that might have not ever heard before or maybe they're just having struggles with their hearing. The reference point in social enterprise is still Tom's. It's the only real gigantic success story. That means that most people still don't even know what social enterprise is. We're not the charity or charities or whoever we work with. We actually have the ability to be relatively dynamic. We can collaborate with other organizations to maximize the effects. I mean, does it really matter if it's playing on your heartstrings, a sincere, you know, move on your part or on their part? I don't think it really does matter. If some of that money is going back to do good, then does it really matter how they're getting it from you? I think when people choose listen over other brands, billion dollar brands, for example, they're choosing to say something like positive about themselves and saying that they not only care about great design and sound, but also care about, you know, more than themselves. You know, how things are made, where they're made, where do the proceeds go, you know, things like that. And it's super important in the market right now. If you're wearing, you know, listen and you're wearing Warby Parker and Tom's and brands like that, I think it's very important to consumers to advertise that they care about other people and not just yourself. I mean, do people want to buy this to broadcast, hey, I'm a good person, I'm giving back? Sure, certainly. I mean, there's always people that want to do that. I think that for social enterprise to really work and to take away any doubt, you have to make it a product that people already want, that they were already going to buy and make it a quality product that there's no risk. Make it risk free. I think brands with stories are really, that's where it's at right now. People want to be heading back to more boutique type of thing. It's a one of a kind thing, which is kind of brilliant to make it a cool sleek product, to make it something that says, hey, I'm a good person and I'm a different kind of person. I'm different than the rest of them. That's big. I mean, that's, you've hit the mark. Listen is making a real impact and that's why our customers are so behind us. With the headphones off the ground, Listen is now investing in new product lines and growing the company. It's an expansion that will force Listen in a competition with a whole new set of deep pocketed rivals. So we just changed our name from Listen Headphones to Listen Sound Company because we're putting out a ton of new products. The last six months we've been really focused on product development, like speakers and ear plugs and kind of figuring out the next step for Listen so we could not only compete with the bigger brands, but also give our customers who love us the opportunity to have more things from us. I think these kind of brands can stake out their own little corner to buy this little special boutique brand. I think there's always a place for that. Is it going to be for the major populace? Is it going to be the big place? No. They're not going to beat Beats at that game. But is there always a place for that and can they survive? I think they totally can. Yeah.