Our Business Journey
2020-
Challenges & Opportunities:
DoHo, headquartered in Chicago, is a hearing aid manufacturer that not only provides premium hearing aids wholesale services to businesses in the United States, Australia and Hong Kong but also operates two hearing clinics locally, offering retail and services to end consumers.
Unfortunately, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the shipping costs for exports to Australia and Hong Kong surged, and the macroeconomic impact led to a sharp decline in orders from various regions. More critically, the two physical stores also lost their former vitality. Under tremendous pressure, DoHo's leadership made significant strategic decisions, seeking new opportunities by expanding the business on the website.
June 2021 -
New Journey:
At the end of 2020, we gradually ceased all export operations and offline stores, shifting our focus entirely to online sales of our hearing aids.
Initially, our hearing aids did not gain widespread recognition. The first hearing aid we sold online, the DoHo™-ONE, faced challenges as it couldn't provide customers with hearing tests to meet their specific frequency needs, resulting in numerous returns and refunds, causing financial losses for the company.
To address this issue, Dr. Glenville led the research team in spending a considerable amount of time organizing and analyzing the hearing loss data of our previous clinic customers. Ultimately, we discovered that approximately 98% of customers had hearing loss frequencies concentrated between 500Hz and 3500Hz. Based on this theory, we spent four months redesigning, molding, testing, and debugging. Finally, we launched the first DoHo™- RIC model with fixed frequencies in the summer and obtained the satisfactory result.
November 2021 -
Research & Upgrade：
In the five months following the release of DoHo™-RIC, we actively gathered a wealth of customer feedback through telephone interviews. While most customers were satisfied with our hearing aids, we also received valuable suggestions, including issues like easy detachment from the ear, whistling, noise, and the demand for more models. Although these are challenges commonly faced by hearing aids in the market, we believed it was time to develop a new generation of hearing aids!
Under the leadership of Dr. Glenville, we successfully overcame a series of technical challenges and decided to upgrade the new models with the following features: whistling suppression technology, replacing the old 8-channel model with a 24-channel one, upgrading the speaker to an RIC Balanced Armature Speaker, introducing a 10-second delayed start-up, replacing the single-layer ear cap with a double-layer one, and more. In the end, we named the latest two models: RIC-PRO and ITE-PRO and they were released in November.
2023 & 2024 -
Moving Forward:
Up to now, DoHo™ has been operating online for three years, and our three models of hearing aids have been successfully on the market for two years. In overcoming various technological difficulties and challenges, our products and team have become more mature and stable. This process has profoundly taught us that only through continuous research, innovation, and practical application of technology can we truly produce hearing aids that meet the genuine needs of consumers. We will adhere to this philosophy and continue moving forward.
Through collaboration with logistics operators in various countries, we now have the capability to sell and ship our products to more regions. We will focus more on the global market rather than solely on the U.S. market, enabling more people to purchase our high-tech hearing aids.
