Nupur Technologies had a slow and steady upward trajectory after figuring out its niche.
Then TikTok found the Earigator.
The company – based in the University at Buffalo’s Baird Research Park in Amherst – has seen orders increase 400% this year after its customers started posting Earigator videos.
The videos are ... goopy. And apparently satisfying to many people.
“Seeing balls of earwax get flushed out of people’s ears is apparently an effective way to get TikTok views,” said Rohan Bansal, the firm’s chief technology officer.
One video alone – from a TikTok user who calls herself Eargirl – has received nearly 20,000 likes since late June. There are some more here. And here.
Bansal said when you add them together, it comes to hundreds of millions of views.
Viral trends come and go, but the Earigator is not a fad. It was first commercialized by a Buffalo doctor in the 1990s as a more effective, less painful way to remove wax from ears. But it was too expensive to manufacture and the business never took off, Bansal said.
About six years ago it was re-engineered by Bansal and his business partners, Brij Bansal (Rohan’s cousin and the company’s vice president of operations) and Nupur CEO Joseph Priest.
While they believed the Earigator’s core innovations – other methods are cumbersome and painful – still made it the best product on the market, they initially struggled to convince ear, nose and throat specialists that it was worth the $2,600-$3,000 price tag.
Then they pivoted to hearing aid centers, which exist in every region across the world. Those centers previously had to farm out ear-cleaning services to doctors. Now they can just fire up the Earigator.
“We started making inroads into that market, and we just got incredible feedback from them,” Bansal said. “This is something they were never able to do before.”
Business picked up in recent years as Nupur technologies started to penetrate that market.
Then earlier in 2021, the hearing aid centers started posting videos to TikTok.
“None of us, between the three partners, know anything about social media,” Bansal said. “My sister-in-law sent me a link and said, ‘Have you seen this? You guys are on TikTok.' ”
Even so, Nupur’s leadership didn’t think social media marketing would matter much, given their B2B model. Then orders started skyrocketing as hearing aid centers around the world saw a popular service and a marketing opportunity, all for a few thousand dollars. Nupur is now catching up on its backlog and considering adding more employees to its seven-person team.
The opportunity is enormous. Bansal said there are about 20,000 hearing aid dispensers in North American, and his company has sold into a few hundred of them. As the Earigator becomes an industry standard, he said, the firm will revisit physician’s offices, from ENTs to pediatricians and geriatricians.
“We’re just getting our name out there for the first time ever, and people are starting to understand that this is how you should clean people’s ears,” he said. “We don’t think this is a case where we go viral and then business goes back down when that ends.”
