GN Hearing Brand Guidelines: Danavox, a Blocked Sale & ReSound’s Danish Parent

A hearing-aid maker inside a telegraph group.

GN Hearing is the hearing-aid company of the Danish group GN Store Nord, and its history runs through several names. The Crypto Museum, a Dutch online collection of communications equipment, says in a page dated June 2021 that its Danish forerunner, Danavox, was founded in 1943 by Gerd Rosenstand, and that it was taken over in 1977 by the Great Northern Telegraph Company, the cable business that the industrialist C.F. Tietgen set up in Copenhagen in 1869. The sources read for this guide do not describe Danavox’s activity during the German occupation of Denmark, which lasted until 1945.

The parent had its own reasons to look beyond telegraphy. English Wikipedia says competition from wireless telegraphy grew in the late 1930s and that the Second World War damaged the company’s lines so badly that by 1945 only two were left: the England–Faroes–Iceland line and the Sweden–Finland line. Its answer was to invest across industries, beginning with the battery maker Hellesens in 1939 and later adding businesses such as the electrical-goods maker Lauritz Knudsen, the radiotelephone maker Storno, the measuring-equipment firm Elmi and Danavox.

In 1985 the telegraph company renamed itself GN Store Nord, GN standing for Great Nordic, to create a new group identity, and every subsidiary gained the same prefix, Wikipedia says; the hearing business became GN Danavox. In 1999 GN bought the Californian company ReSound and merged it with GN Danavox as GN ReSound, which the Crypto Museum says was then the fourth-largest maker of hearing aids in the world. The ReSound side of that story is told in our ReSound guide.

Within the group, the Crypto Museum says, the hearing business is now the company GN Hearing A/S, with its headquarters in Ballerup, north-west of Copenhagen, where GN Store Nord settled after leaving its historic building on Kongens Nytorv, according to Wikipedia.

A sale that never happened.

The business came close to leaving the group. English Wikipedia says that on 2 October 2006 GN announced it would sell its hearing-aid business and its audiological equipment maker, GN Otometrics, to the Swiss company Phonak, now called Sonova. The sale needed approval in several countries. On 12 April 2007 Germany’s competition authority, the Bundeskartellamt, prohibited it. Its press release said the companies to be acquired were known in the market as GN ReSound, described Germany as the second-largest hearing-aid market after the United States, and argued that the takeover would give Siemens, Phonak and Oticon a collective dominant position there.

The Hearing Review reported on 23 August 2007 that Sonova had formally terminated the transaction after a German appeals court declined to let the merger go ahead while the appeal was heard. GN, the magazine said, would keep pursuing that appeal on its own. Wikipedia describes the years that followed as a hard restructuring for a group left with two underperforming businesses and heavy debt.

GN kept the hearing business and, by its own account, rebuilt it around wireless technology. English Wikipedia says GN Hearing launched what it calls the world’s first hearing aid with 2.4 GHz wireless technology in 2010 and the first Made for iPhone hearing aid in 2014, which streamed sound from an iPhone without a body-worn device. GN’s heritage page lists those among its “world firsts,” together with ReSound Assist Live, a remote fine-tuning service with live video consultation, and the ReSound ONE, which it describes as a hearing aid with a microphone and a receiver in the ear.

Production spread across continents. ScandAsia reported on 21 September 2015 that GN ReSound had inaugurated a manufacturing and distribution site at Kulaijaya, in the Malaysian state of Johor, on 3 September that year, in a ceremony hosted by its chief executive, Anders Hedegaard. The same report said the company also ran manufacturing and distribution facilities in Xiamen, China, in the UK and in Spain, with research and manufacturing in Denmark and the United States, and that Johor had been chosen over alternatives around the world.

How hearing brands present themselves.

Hearing-aid makers sell a product that is meant to be hard to see, and much of their imagery works around that. Devices are shown balanced on a fingertip to make their size clear, or in close-ups of the ear, where a behind-the-ear case and its thin tube or wire are the only visible trace. The Bern newspaper Der Bund noted in 2012 that hearing aids, unlike glasses, still had an image problem, and that makers were trying both to shrink them and to give them designed housings in a choice of colours.

Colour tends to follow the body rather than fashion. Many ranges come in skin tones, greys and silvers meant to blend with hair and skin, with brighter shells offered as options. Around the device sit the settings of professional care: the audiology booth, the fitting session and, more recently, the phone app used to stream sound or adjust a program.

The industry is concentrated and old. In 2007 Germany’s competition authority, the Bundeskartellamt, named Siemens, Phonak and Oticon as the main producers in the German market, with GN ReSound and Widex as the next-largest. Several of today’s brands began inside telephone and telegraph companies: Bernafon at a Swiss telephone maker in 1946, and GN Hearing’s forerunner Danavox in a Danish group that started with telegraph cables. Most are now part of a few groups that each run several brands side by side.

The trade meets at its own congresses. In Germany the annual EUHA congress of hearing-aid acousticians is where makers show new ranges to the trade; in the United States the American Academy of Audiology’s convention, long known as AudiologyNOW!, plays a similar role. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

One company, several brands.

GN Hearing works through several brands rather than under its own name. A Hearing Review report of 16 December 2021 described it as the parent company of ReSound, Beltone and Audigy, and English Wikipedia also lists Interton and Danavox among the group’s brands. The same 2021 report said GN Hearing would buy a controlling stake in Lively, an American online hearing-aid seller whose devices GN had supplied since Lively was founded in 2018. GN Hearing’s chief executive at the time, Gitte Aabo, said in the announcement that “hearing health is being elevated on the overall healthcare agenda.” The magazine added that GN’s headset and hearing businesses planned to launch Jabra Enhance Plus, earbuds aimed at people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, in early 2022.

The hearing business now sits inside what GN calls a one-GN organisation, with research teams shared across the group. On 4 February 2025 GN announced the ReSound Vivia, which it called its most intelligent hearing aid yet and the industry’s smallest receiver-in-ear model, with an AI approach that GN says models the brain’s natural sound processing; those are the company’s claims. Peter Karlstromer, chief executive of GN Group, said its research and development teams had “come together in a unified organization.”

For a design guide, GN Hearing shows a corporate name that stays in the background while its brands face the customer. Compare ReSound, its flagship, and Beltone, its American sister brand. For this guide we use a navy and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep GN Hearing’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.