Henri Heikkinen

People ask me every now and then how Valco’s headphones differ from the competition. Apparently the expected answer is an engineering lecture, or at least a comparison chart where we have slightly more decibels and megapixels.

That makes sense, because in Finland things are traditionally judged by what can be measured about them, not by what can be experienced from them.

But the answer is much more ordinary, and that’s exactly why it feels confusing to a lot of people:

“I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t think about it very often.”

Valco products hold up against any competitor, and that’s enough. This is not indifference, nor is it a sign that we don’t care about quality. It’s the starting point for why Valco is built differently from what many people assume.

Over the years, I’ve developed my own logic for the secret of a company’s success. Its cornerstones are marketing, product, and trust.

In this whole setup, marketing is the first glance, kind of like a dating app profile that might spark interest and lead to a first date.

After that, the product has to satisfy the customer in every possible way, but technical perfection alone won’t carry the relationship very far.

People talk about those first two everywhere, but in the end continuity comes from the third one: trust.

The relationship between a company and a customer only begins when the product is taken into use. And that relationship gets tested in the moments nobody wants but nobody can avoid either: when something breaks, when a delivery is late, or when the product doesn’t work the way it was supposed to.

That’s when a company’s value isn’t measured by how clever its marketing messages are or how comprehensive its technical features are, but by how the company handles the situation and what kind of answer the customer gets.

For us, this understanding didn’t come from theory but from practice, when 2021 forced us to face a situation we hadn’t hoped for and didn’t really know enough to fear.

A small and at first almost unnoticed component fault turned over the course of weeks into a problem affecting thousands of headphones, while at the same time colliding with pandemic-era shipping difficulties, rising costs, and general uncertainty.

The situation wasn’t exactly made easier by the fact that I had just bought a detached house and my spouse was expecting a child. The circumstances were ideal in every way for the problems to feel huge, and they did.

When every single headphone in one product batch turned out to be faulty in one way or another, marketing, products, and brand talk instantly lost all meaning.

The only question that mattered was how we act in a situation that couldn’t be dodged or outsourced, and wasn’t going to get better with explanations.

The only possible way forward was to start fixing as much as we could, as fast as the circumstances allowed, and just tell people openly everything that was happening.

We did it as well as we knew how at the time. It wasn’t perfect, but we didn’t leave the customer alone at the moment when their trust was being tested.

And even though the situation was expensive, draining, and unpleasant in many ways, it was also the only way to act that I as an entrepreneur could stand behind.

Over the years, this idea has become the core of how Valco operates. When something goes wrong, we deal with it. When something works badly, we improve it. And when a customer gets in touch with a problem, they get an answer from Jouni, not ticket #473758 from a faceless system. Even if there is in fact a streamlined customer service system and a polished process in the background.

We don’t claim to be perfect. We’ve screwed up quite impressively even very recently, but every mistake has given us a push to do better the next time.

We keep improving quality all the time, and our goal is that the service department mostly drinks coffee, watches Netflix, and every now and then repairs a headphone that a dog has eaten. But we’re not under the illusion that mistakes will disappear completely. They’re part of life and part of running a business.

When you do this consistently, the result shows up in ordinary places. According to a survey we ran at checkout, more than 26% of customers (over 4000 respondents) say they heard about us from someone they know and ended up choosing Valco because of that. That is the single biggest channel.

Our NPS, which measures how willing customers are to recommend us, stays above 80 year after year, and average customer satisfaction is 9.35 on a scale of 0–10. But maybe the most telling measure of success is the customer who tattooed the Valco logo on themselves. Slightly insane, but appreciated.

If I were selling some self-help lecture to companies, it would be tempting to claim that all of this is based on some great insight or a carefully designed operating model by which I have systematically built Valco.

The truth is more ordinary and less heroic: I simply can’t sell anything I don’t believe in myself. For some reason, I don’t have that kind of moral flexibility that would let me polish things up or build a brand on thin air. So the only option left is to do things as honestly as they can be done and talk about them just as directly to the outside world.

Luckily, I haven’t done this alone. I founded Valco with another equally odd guy, which made this way of working practically self-evident right from the start.  Over the years, we’ve also found people around us who have an excellent value base. Not because we specifically went looking for it, but because this way of working seems to attract the right kind of people.

This inevitably shows in the way we talk about our own business and products. If something goes wrong, we don’t know how to hide it. If something works well, we say that too exactly as it is. The VMK15 model is a good example of this: it was released for people with small heads and for those who can’t afford to buy VMK25 headphones.

A lot of people think that’s funny marketing, but first and foremost it’s completely true. I’m not actually a very funny person. I’m just honest, and in modern society that apparently sounds humorous.

That’s also why we don’t market Valco headphones as being technically more miraculous than the competition. They aren’t. They’re made largely from the same top-tier components as, say, B&O, Bose, or Sennheiser, and that’s no secret.

Our slogan, “the best headphones you can afford,” does not refer only to ridiculously good sound quality. As the saying goes, a poor person can’t afford to buy cheap crap. When you buy Valcos, you also buy the certainty that we’ll take care of you even if something breaks. That ultimately always makes the product cheaper than the alternative that leaves the customer alone.

This is also why we don’t primarily think of Valco as a headphone company, even though we sell headphones. If we ever sold leather handjob gloves or Valco wine, we’d do everything in exactly the same way. The product changes, the principle doesn’t.

Headphones are our product. Trust is the foundation of our existence, and the people around us are the ones who build it.