Sonic Brand Guidelines: A Utah Digital Hearing Aid Start-Up Inside Demant

A university algorithm looking for a business.

Sonic began as a research project. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, the company had its origins in the digital signal processing research of Doug Chabries and Richard Christiansen, professors at Brigham Young University. Chabries developed a new algorithm for processing audio signals; on the way to a working hearing aid he was helped by Thomas Stockham, the digital-recording pioneer at the University of Utah, and by Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology, who designed the small, powerful chip the hearing aids would use.

The group formed Sonix Technologies, Inc. in Utah in May 1991 while it looked for venture capital, the same directory says, and Utah’s Centers of Excellence programme, set up in 1987 to help university researchers start businesses, was an important early backer. The company took the name Sonic Innovations in 1996 and appointed Andrew Raguskus, who had worked at the hearing aid maker ReSound and at Sonic Solutions, as president and chief executive that September.

For most of its independent life it was a Salt Lake City company. At its first launch it was based in Murray, a suburb of the city, and its head office stayed in Salt Lake City until after its sale. Its factory, though, moved east: by the end of 1999 manufacturing had been moved to a new facility in Eagan, Minnesota, which the directory describes as a centre of the hearing aid industry.

Natura, Conforma and Adesso.

The first product was the Natura, launched in September 1998. The directory notes that Sonic was not first to market — Oticon, Siemens and Widex were already selling digital hearing aids, which had been available since 1996 — and describes the Natura as a nine-channel instrument, against the three channels usually found in analogue aids, programmed through the company’s own EXPRESSfit software on a Palm Pilot. Some versions were small enough to sit deep in the ear canal.

New lines followed quickly. In 2000 Sonic introduced the Conforma, whose soft foam shell was meant to let a hearing aid be fitted in a single visit, and the mid-range Altair; in March 2002 came the Adesso, an instant-fit model worn completely in the canal and aimed at first-time wearers. Sonic also sold components to another manufacturer, Starkey, which in Sonic’s first year of sales was its largest customer, the directory says.

The company listed its shares on the Nasdaq exchange in May 2000 and spent the next two years buying distributors abroad: in Australia in 2001, then in Denmark, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in 2002, according to the directory. It had set up a Danish subsidiary, Sonic Innovations A/S, as early as 1998.

By 2010 the business sat inside a holding company, Otix Global of Salt Lake City, which owned Sonic Innovations and the HearingLife retail brand. In September 2010 Otix agreed to merge into William Demant Holding, the Danish parent of Oticon and Bernafon, The Hearing Review reported; the same report said Otix had decided to stop its operations in Germany.

Design and documentation.

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.

From Sonic Innovations to “Sonic.”

The sale was contested. GN ReSound, the parent of ReSound, made a rival offer in September and October 2010, and William Demant won with a final matching bid on 13 October, The Hearing Review reported when the deal closed on 30 November 2010, after clearance by the US Federal Trade Commission. Sonic became the group’s third hearing-aid brand, with the United States named as its main market. The Salt Lake City head office was to close and the brand’s headquarters to move to New Jersey, where Oticon was based; the Eagan production site was to continue.

The renaming came next. In October 2011 the company said it would now call itself simply “Sonic,” although it remained officially Sonic Innovations, Inc., and set out what it called the “4S Foundation”: sound that’s natural, speech understanding in noise, simplicity in everything, and style that stands out. At the same time its Minnesota production moved into a new building of more than 20,000 square feet in Eagan, its world headquarters moved from Salt Lake City to Somerset, New Jersey, in early 2012, and a new international office opened in Switzerland, The Hearing Review reported.

Demant’s own history still lists 2010 as the year Otix Global was acquired, adding Sonic as a third brand. Sonic’s current website describes it as part of the Demant Group, with the parent’s headquarters in Smørum, Denmark, and leans on Demant’s heritage, which it dates to 1904, rather than on its Utah origins. It sells through distributors and local hearing care professionals, notes that not all products are available in every region, and shows ranges such as the A1, the Z1 and the Trek. Its line is “Everyday Sounds Better.”

For a design guide, Sonic shows how a start-up name built on one technology can be simplified and folded into a larger group’s brand family. Compare Demant, its parent since 2010, and Oticon, the sister brand whose New Jersey base it joined. For this guide we use a deep teal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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