A side project, an accelerator in Brussels and a ring-shaped earplug.

Loop Earplugs is a Belgian company founded in 2016 by two childhood friends, Maarten Bodewes and Dimitri O. In a 2023 profile, CNBC Make It reported that the pair, with backgrounds in commercial and civil engineering, had noticed a ringing in their ears after loud concerts in their late twenties, and began to ask why so few people wore hearing protection. The products they found, Bodewes told CNBC, were ugly, uncomfortable or spoiled the music: in his words, “ugly Christmas trees sticking out your ears, or those ugly foamies.”

At the time Bodewes was an account manager at Microsoft, and O ran a start-up of his own, TariefChecker, which compared energy prices. For about two years they worked on earplugs in their spare time, CNBC reported, 3D-printing prototypes with different shapes, canal lengths, sound entries and filters, testing them on electronic dummies in rented anechoic chambers, and spray-painting samples in a back yard to try on friends and family. The company’s own website says it started in Dimitri’s mother’s garage.

In 2016 their prototypes won them a place at Start it @KBC, a start-up accelerator in Brussels. “We were accepted on Friday, and I think I quit my job on Monday,” Bodewes told CNBC. Backed by loans and small rounds from angel investors, Loop’s earplugs reached the market in 2018, in chains including CVS in the United States and Saturn in Europe, according to the same report.

An earplug designed to be seen.

The idea that defined Loop was to make an earplug people would not mind being seen wearing. Its earplugs have a distinctive ring — the loop of the name — and come in finishes from black and silver to orange, pink and purple; CNBC described them as “designed to look like jewelry.” Wired, reviewing the first model in May 2018, gave it 8 out of 10 and wrote that, worn in the ear, it looked like a conch piercing. The review described an acoustic channel intended to imitate the ear canal, ending in a mesh filter that Wired said reduced sound by 20 decibels across all frequencies, a body of hypoallergenic plastic, three sizes of ear tip and colour names such as “Raving Red” and “Glorious Gold”; its main complaint was that the earplugs were only comfortable for short periods.

That first model became the Loop Experience, aimed at concerts, festivals and other loud places. The range has since grown to Engage, which is meant to soften background noise while keeping voices clear; Quiet, for general noise; Switch, unveiled in October 2023, which lets the wearer move between settings; and Dream, for sleep. For the current Experience 2, the company gives a figure of 17 dB (SNR) and calls it certified hearing protection; we report those as its own figures. It sells the earplugs with silicone tips in four sizes and a keychain case.

Collaborations have extended the jewelry idea into limited colourways, including editions with the McLaren Formula 1 team, Coachella, which named Loop its official earplug partner ahead of its 2025 festival, Variety reported, and the Belgian dance festival Tomorrowland. Reviewers have also noted that the earplugs have found a following among neurodivergent people and others sensitive to noise, a use the company now leans into with its talk of “sensory overload.”

Hearing protection becomes a consumer brand.

The seven brands in this group all sell earplugs, but they come from very different places and decades. The oldest is German and more than a century old; the newest names arrived in the 2010s, selling online and, in one case, through crowdfunding. What they share is a product people put in their ears to turn the world down, sold to concert-goers, musicians, sleepers and travellers.

Three are new names built around filtered plugs for music and nightlife. Loop is a Belgian company founded in 2016 by the childhood friends Maarten Bodewes and Dimitri O., according to Wikipedia and the company, and CNBC reported in 2023 that it was headquartered in Antwerp. Eargasm says it is based in Southern California and was founded in 2015 by Ryan Parry. Earasers belongs to Persona Medical of Florida, whose president, Don Campbell, designed the soft silicone plug, the company says.

Two date from the 1990s. Alpine Hearing Protection says it was founded in the Netherlands in 1994 as a pioneer of reusable filtered earplugs for the general public. In 2025 the Belgian investor Gimv announced it was taking a majority stake. ACS says it was established in 1994 to make custom-fit hearing protection, and describes itself as a privately owned UK company that also makes in-ear monitors.

The last two are the outliers. Flare Audio began as a three-person pro-audio maker in a garden garage on England’s south coast, it says, before crowdfunding its Isolate ear protector; Companies House lists Flare Audio Limited, of Lancing in West Sussex, as incorporated in 2007. Ohropax was founded in Berlin in 1907 by the pharmacist Maximilian Negwer, is still run by his family, and makes its wax plugs in Wehrheim, near Frankfurt.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From near-collapse to a $44 million year.

Loop’s growth was not smooth. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut concerts and clubs, monthly sales fell from about $100,000 to under $20,000, Bodewes told CNBC, and at one point the company was “two weeks away from not having any money.” It moved to selling directly to consumers, replaced bulky plastic cases with simple envelopes, and began marketing its earplugs for everyday uses such as focusing at work and sleeping. It ended 2020 with $1.2 million in revenue and raised $1 million in seed funding that year, led by the Belgian investment firm Akiles, CNBC reported.

The reopening of nightlife changed the numbers. According to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, Loop’s sales reached roughly $44.1 million in 2022, up 350 percent on the year before, and Bodewes said the company was on track to triple that figure in 2023 and had made a profit every year since 2020. By October 2023 it had about 200 employees, with headquarters in Antwerp and offices in Amsterdam, New York and Shanghai, and named the American brand Eargasm and Europe’s Vibes among its rivals. The company’s website now claims “14 million happy customers” and says Loop won a “Most Sustainable Growth” award at the Deloitte Technology Fast 50; we give both as its claims. We could not find a statement of where the earplugs are manufactured on the company pages we checked, and the 2023 CNBC report does not say.

Its stated mission is now broader than concerts: “We don’t make earplugs to tune life out, we make earwear that helps people find calm in it,” the company says.

For a design guide, Loop shows how a functional product can become an accessory once its shape is treated as the brand. Compare Etymotic, the American hearing lab behind the classic musicians’ earplug, and Westone, the Colorado earmold maker. For this guide we use midnight, violet and rose with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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