‘The Ear Is The New Wrist'

Somehow, a strange and brazen corporate fraud case preceded a breakthrough in wearable tech: A hearing aid that’s also a fitness tracker, a health monitor, a fall detector, and a near-instantaneous translator

- Josh Dean

When Brandon Sawalich started at Starkey Hearing Technologies in suburban Minneapolis, he was 19 and there were about 70 companies worldwide making hearing aids. That was 1994. His job was to clean the ones mailed in for repair or, occasionally, as returns, because the user was dead and no longer required them. Today, Sawalich is 43, there are five companies, and he’s president of Starkey, which employs 6,000 people and sold $800 million in hearing aids last year. “We’ve been right here in Eden Prairie since 1974,” Sawalich says as he walks me through company headquarters, then corrects himself. “Technically, it started a few years before that, in the basement of Mr. Austin’s home. It’s one of those great entrepreneurial American success stories.”

Sawalich moved from waxy buildup to events to sales to, finally, president, the company’s top position, which he assumed in 2016 in the wake of a fraud scandal that rocked Starkey. He’s also stepson of the aforementioned Mr. Austin—William Austin, the billionaire company founder who built Starkey into a privately held Goliath and has made hearing aids for seemingly every famous person who requires them, including four U.S. presidents, two popes, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa.

Starkey is now the only one of the surviving Big Five manufacturers based in the U.S. What’s thinned the herd of competitors, Sawalich says, is technology. Hearing aids used to be relatively simple, inexpensive to make, and not hugely different from brand to brand. Today they’re an increasingly complex digital product, requiring teams of engineers and robust investment in research and development.