The earplug dream of Jiangyin

Founding story

It started with the sound of weaving

Joshua Gu was born and raised in Jiangyin, a textile town on the lower Yangtze where almost every family owned a weaving loom. Men and women worked the mills by day and the looms at home by night, and the rhythmic clatter of weaving carried through the streets around the clock. To the town it was the sound of money coming in. Almost nobody thought to put cotton in their ears — earplugs were not a product people knew.

Years of that noise took a toll that never appeared on any balance sheet: widespread hearing loss. It may be why so many people in Jiangyin speak loudly. When Joshua began his career in 1999 he learned that noise-induced hearing loss cannot be reversed. He also noticed that foreign ship crews docking in the region ordered earplugs and earmuffs to protect themselves, and that nearly all of that supply came from 3M, Honeywell and their peers in the United States and Europe. In China only a handful of small workshops made earplugs at all, and the quality was poor.

In 2004 he decided to change that. He would study sound technology and work out how to make a genuinely good earplug in China. He travelled to foam-material and foaming-machine manufacturers across China, Europe and the United States. None of them could supply a complete foaming-earplug production line. He eventually bought a junior foaming line and started production, then spent years consulting specialists to upgrade the technology and renew the equipment.

During those hard years a professor of PU foam asked him why he insisted on earplugs when he could have chosen any number of easier products. He said no thanks. By then he was certain the work was worth doing: governments including China's had begun legislating to protect workers' hearing, and roughly 400 million people still struggle with sleep that earplugs can help. After years of conversation the professor told him he now recognised what Joshua was doing as valuable work for humanity.

Today Eastragon makes top-quality foam earplugs and designs a full range of hearing-protective products: for sleeping, music festivals, motorcycle riding, shooting, travel and swimming. Our earplugs are worn by people around the world — through the night, in the crowd, on the road, on the range, in transit and in the water.

Our dream now is simple: to make high-quality earplugs available at a reasonable cost, and to help people everywhere get into the habit of protecting their hearing.