Lucid Hearing — Inspiring healthy hearing for life

As one of our primary senses, the ability to hear enables us to connect to the world for many important reasons. It helps us maintain relationships with friends and family, participate in team and community activities, and experience life events. Hearing makes it possible to engage, listen, laugh, and enjoy many of the things that help shape quality of life, and fortunately for most individuals who experience hearing loss, there are advanced hearing solutions available that suit today’s active lifestyles.

Fort Worth-based Lucid Hearing’s mission is to help people hear better and to that end, the company is dedicated to creating some of the most innovative hearing aid products to support people with hearing loss regain their ability to hear. Since 2009, they have offered a holistic approach to hearing health and have helped millions across their hearing healthcare family of brands, encompassing hearing enhancement, enjoyment, protection, and detection.

Recently, CIO Bulletin spoke exclusively to Tim Schnell, founder and CEO of Lucid Hearing. The following excerpts are taken from the conversation that ensued

Q. How did you decide to launch Lucid Hearing? How has the business evolved over time?

After acquiring a company that offered hearing amplification and protection products, I recognized similarities between hearing aids and my new company’s products. My personal experience as a hearing aid user sparked my interest in and entrance into the hearing healthcare category. With my cofounder and partner, Henry Smith, I produced a plan and process for producing a viable business model to manufacture and distribute hearing aids.

The idea of what this could look like came to me while shopping in a wholesale store where a direct sales process was in place. The practitioners were speaking with customers, running diagnostics and selling hearing aids. Having worked for Sam’s Club for over 10 years, I knew they had nothing like that in their stores, which prompted the question, “How can we take that model into Sam’s Clubs?” From there, Smith and I worked together to get Lucid Hearing into the retail space, facilitating a partnership with Sam’s Club where Lucid Hearing now offers free hearing tests in more than 450 Sam’s Club locations and sells hearing aids that customers can begin wearing immediately.

The hearing aid industry has evolved rapidly over the years, thanks to technological advances that have resulted in the devices themselves becoming smaller and more discreet while delivering even better sound quality. With the FDA’s opening of the over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid market in 2022, the industry is seeing growth in the mild-to-moderate hearing aid category as a result of increased awareness about hearing loss.

Q. What is the vision of Lucid Hearing?

At Lucid Hearing, our mission is Helping People Hear Better®, and as such, our vision is to inspire healthy hearing for life and help as many people as possible throughout their hearing journey. That is why we offer products across the hearing health spectrum through our family of brands, including hearing enhancement, enjoyment, protection and detection.

Q. How serious is Lucid Hearing when it comes to innovation?

Innovation is at the heart of everything we do. Every aspect of product design and development, including hardware, firmware, software, and services, is actively pursued, including the development of original concepts and intellectual property.  In every component of our technology stack, Lucid Hearing is committed to developing and utilizing new AI technologies. Additionally, as a business, we make an effort to innovate across the board, including in our training programs, clinic operations, logistics, and other areas.

Q. Can you give us a brief overview of the various products that Lucid Hearing offers?

Lucid Hearing’s products range from traditional prescription hearing aids to a continually expanding portfolio of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids for those with mild to moderate hearing loss. Combined with our products for hearing enjoyment and protection, Lucid Hearing’s expansive portfolio offers consumers a holistic hearing health experience.

One of the key differentiators for our hearing aids — both our OTC line and prescription line — is our exclusive Powered by Lucid® technology, which uses up to an industry leading 128 channels to deliver high-definition sound and clarity. While most other brands use compression technology and offer only up to 64 channels, Lucid uses technology developed with adaptive dynamic range optimization based on research developed for the cochlear implant, so our technology truly differentiates us. All of our products offer high quality, high definition sound because of the research and development that produced them, and that translates into high value for the consumer. Additionally, all of our premium OTC products can be upgraded to a custom programmed prescription solution at any of the company’s 500+hearing centers, another unique-to-Lucid Hearing value.

Q. What organizational elements encourage innovation so that you can offer your customers better products?

We have a dedicated VP of Innovation role in our R&D organization, and we focus time and resources on innovating across all areas of our products, software, and services. Plus, as a vertically integrated company, we have a direct line of communication with customers. Customer interactions are a great place to find inspiration, and we have a large collection of first-party hearing data. Utilizing this data, our data science team created machine learning models, opening up exciting opportunities to develop new goods and services.

Q. What goals does Lucid Hearing have for the future?

Our number one priority is and always will be to support our customers through their hearing journey. At our core, we are focused on providing education at an early stage, offering resources and protection people need and providing ongoing support for their hearing amplification needs as hearing loss progresses. Two key components of this support will be to increase hearing health awareness by helping people understand what impacts their hearing and arming them with resources to protect their hearing, because once you lose it, it does not come back. This also means increasing access to our OTC hearing aids for people with mild to moderate hearing loss by making OTC hearing solutions available in retail venues where they regularly shop.

Additionally, to fully support the hearing journey, it will be vital to continue learning from our hearing specialists and customers in our 500+hearing centers. These locations are the front lines for us, and they secure everything we need to continue developing best-in-class products for prescription and OTC hearing aids and protection. By going directly to our customers and meeting them where they are, we can refine our testing and dispensing process by learning directly from our rich patient data.

Empowering people with hearing loss to regain their hearing

Tim Schnell is the founder and CEO of Lucid Hearing, one of the largest hearing aid manufacturers in the United States and the seventh largest globally. Schnell, who has worn hearing aids himself since his early 30s, attributes his company’s success to a smart and hard-working team, the company’s laser focus on research and innovation, and the creation of highly effective retail partnerships, most notably with Sam’s Club.

“We believe every person should have access to better hearing.”