Hearing aids and hearing loss - Bonavox provide high quality hearing aids with hearing aid repairs and servicing. Bonavox are specialists in hearing loss and problems.

Hearing Aids - History of Bonavox

For almost 40 years, Bonavox has provided exceptional service to its clients from its North Earl Street base just off Dublin's O'Connell Street.

The company was started by Bill Hennessy in 1967. Originally it was based on the outskirts of Dublin but moved to its current location in the heart of the city in the early 1970s.

Until his retirement in 2009, Bill was a constant presence in the shop. He provided a level of personal service that was at the core of the business when it started and which continues to this day.

For customers returning to the shop, Bonavox is synonymous with high-quality service and high-quality products. But the name of the shop is known around the world, thanks to a certain singer who fronts the biggest band in the world.

We caught up with Bill to talk to him about the things he did to make Bonovox stand out in the marketplace, and about how a decision by a young singer christened Paul Hewson to change his name resulted in the shop receiving fan mail.

What made you decide to start Bonavox?

I'd been working for other people in the hearing aid business and I felt that people were been short changed. I thought that people deserved a better service. I'd worked for four or five different companies in Ireland and in Britain and everywhere I went I felt they were doing the same thing wrong.

Which was...?

If you bought a hearing aid and it broke down, then you would have to give it back to whoever you bought it from and they would then send it back to the manufacturer. This meant that the customer would be without it for a couple of weeks.

I thought, 'I'm not doing that'. We set about finding a premises and then started building a back-up service. Our back-up service meant that we were going to be able to give an aftercare that didn't exist anywhere else.

At that point in time, all of the hearing aid providers did home visits. This sounds like you're offering a good service, but it was an expensive thing to do, and that price would invariably go onto the cost of the hearing aids.

But there was another issue, too. If something went wrong, people always had to wait for their hearing aid provider to go to them. We've got used to being able to walk into a shop and be seen to, but that wasn't the case back then.

Instead, we created a service where people came to us. We were always there in the same spot, and people could just walk in and be served. Everybody in the business at the time said it won't work but I was convinced it would. We wanted to have a sort of hearing aid emporium.

We set about offering a complete service. We got technicians in and sent them to England for training. We had to send them across the water because there were no such things as hearing technicians in Ireland. No one repaired hearing aids in Ireland. With everyone trained, we started to advertise.

Did you have to do a lot of advertising to get people to come to you, given that they'd been so used to people going to them?

The only advertising we did was one full-page ad in the Golden Pages. And it was negative advertising, if you like. We said 'Don't buy a hearing aid, shop around, it's amazing what you can save if you shop wisely. Rather than buying a new one, we will repair your old hearing aid'

And the response was good?

The response was great. Customers would walk in, hand their broken hearing aid over to us, go for a coffee and come in and collect their fixed hearing aid on the way home.

Over the years most of our business was repeat business or came from user recommendations. A major thing for us was that we had the respect of the medical profession. The specialists would send their patients to us knowing they'd be well looked after. We didn't go headhunting, they just got to know from their patients going back to them and telling them what was happening with us. As a result, medical practitioners felt safe sending their patients to us.

Why did you decide to make your base on North Earl Street?

We were originally based on the outskirts of Dublin and moved into the centre because that's where all the action was, obviously. It just grew from there.

I picked North Earl St. in Dublin after doing my homework. Looking at the city centre, there are the two main shopping districts – Grafton Street to the south of the Liffey and Henry Street to the north, with Henry Street being arguably the biggest shopping street in Dublin.

I knew that I wanted to be near Henry Street but with customers coming from all over the country including Northern Ireland and even Britain, I knew I had to find a site for the shop that would be easy to find.

North Earl Street is in the centre, just opposite the GPO and, crucially, it's a very short street with just a handful of shops so if you want to find a location on the street, it's simple, whereas if you're down further it becomes Talbot Street which is much longer.

You accidently became linked with U2 when Paul Hewson started using the stage name Bono Vox. Do you know how he came to settle on a wrongly spelt version of the shop's name?

Paul Hewson has a good friend, an artist called Guggi Rowan. They were school pals and Guggi was around when U2 was being formed.

Guggi, Paul and they were talking about names. Guggi had seen the name above our shop and said to Paul "I've got a brilliant name for you, it's Bono Vox, which means 'Good voice'." He got the name slightly wrong – we're Bonavox, not Bonovox.

Paul took the name Bono Vox in full, later shortening it to just Bono. That's the truth of how he got the name.

Did you know at the time that Bono had used Bonavox as the inspiration for his name? Had you heard of U2?

We didn't know who U2 were and what was happening. Apparently U2 were becoming better known on the continent than they were at home. You know, like a prophet in his own land.

Visitors to Ireland started stopping by and taking photographs. And then we would get letters addressed to Bonovox Dublin. Bono was pretty much unknown at the time in Dublin, but the postmen knew where our shop was and thought the post was for us.

The letters were coming from all around Europe, with strange messages, like "We love your message, obviously you have a Christian soul, you're deep into our hearts with what you put in your lyrics." I thought what on earth is going on here?

The post we'd get would just be dropped in the bin and it took some time for the penny to drop as to what was going on.

As U2 got more famous, people got to know the address they needed to write to and the post to us eventually stopped

Initially we got a lot of that, but I didn't know where to send it off to because I didn't know who they were talking about. I'd never heard of the guy... at that time.

Did people start coming into the shop as a result of the U2 connection?

They did. It got to the stage where they would come in looking for souvenirs – they'd ask for pens with the name Bonavox on them, for instance.

So did you sell a lot of pens?

Absolutely not. We bought lots of pens, but we gave them away for nothing. We didn't cash in, nor did we want to. We were a professional business doing very well. 99% of our clients would be elderly, well-settled people who were far removed from Bono-itis.

Our customers were looking for hearing aids, they weren't interested in being driven deaf by U2!

You decided to retire in 2009. What made you come to that decision?

First of all, I served my apprenticeship - 42 years of it. My health started to deteriorate two years ago and my wife died suddenly. I got lung cancer, a stroke and a heart attack, all in the matter of months. That's all behind me now, and I'm healthy again.

Every morning before I got ill I couldn't wait to get into work. I was enthusiastic. When I lost my wife and my health, I also lost my enthusiasm. I wasn't putting 100% into it as I had always done before, so I knew that the time had come to say goodbye.

I have since handed over the baton to the younger generation, led by Morten Sorenson of Widex Ireland, who will continue to develop the company to fit in with today's changing market place. Bonavox still offers the core services it was founded upon over forty years ago but has undergone many changes particularly with the development of its online presence and recent shop refurbishment.

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