The Person Behind Vancouver Custom Earplugs
I’m Jamie Larsen. I didn’t come to hearing from a textbook – I came to it from a construction site and a stage.
Years ago, when I was working construction and playing music on the side, I got my first pair of custom earplugs. Small thing that turned into a big one. For the first time I had proper protection I actually wanted to wear – comfortable, effective, no fighting with it – and as a musician who’d already watched what a lifetime of loud does to people’s hearing, something clicked. I remember thinking this might be one of the coolest things in the world. I wanted to make them.
The part I didn’t expect
Turns out you can’t just start injecting silicone in people’s ears. To take ear impressions properly, you need to be licensed – and that licensing lives inside the world of audiology and hearing aids, where earplugs are honestly just a small corner. A good ear impression is its own quiet craft: most hearing aids today come stock, so fewer and fewer people still take impressions by hand and do them really well. I wanted to be one of the ones who did.
So I got licensed — I’m a Registered Hearing Instrument Practitioner (RHIP) here in BC, and today I’m the Director of Audiology at Vancouver Custom Earplugs.
You can verify my licence with the College of Health and Care Professionals here
Over a decade in the clinic
I ended up running my own audiology clinic, Simple Hearing Solutions in Burnaby, for over ten years. I spent them elbow-deep in hearing loss, hearing aids, and the real lives of the people wearing them. For a stretch I was the “Ask the Expert” on Global BC’s Sunday morning news. And because of my roots in music, we quietly became the place a lot of people came for earplugs, too.
In 2020, just before the “pandemic”, I sold that clinic to Sonova – one of the largest hearing companies in the world, and finally made a decision I’d been circling for years: to go all in on earplugs.
Why we build our custom earplugs in Vancouver
Here’s the honest part. When I incorporated Vancouver Custom Earplugs, we used the same outside labs my clinic had relied on for years. And they just weren’t good enough. The sleep earplugs especially – people kept telling us the same thing: “they block the sound fine, but I can’t sleep on my side in these.”
That bugged me enough to make it a mission. I set out to design a custom sleep earplug you could actually sleep on your side in and comfortable enough that you forget it’s there. Using audiology-grade, biocompatible materials and a design we reworked from the ground up. It worked. So we kept going to redesign our entire line-up.
And here’s something most people never realize: a lot of places like hearing-aid companies don’t really make your earplugs so much as scan your ear into a file and send it off to be 3D-printed in Mexico or China, then shipped back. We don’t do that. Today there’s a small team of us, and we build every earplug ourselves, right here in BC, start to finish. We control the entire process, from the impression to the finished plug. That control is the only reason we can honestly stand behind every single pair.
The way we think customers should be treated
After years of seeing how this industry works – especially with earplugs, I became convinced there was simply a better way to do it: treat people the way we’d want to be treated. That’s where our guarantees come from, and I don’t know anywhere else in custom ear products that stands behind their work like this:
30-day
money-back guarantee
1-year
fit guarantee from the day you get them
3-year
warranty on top of that
What we’re really trying to do
Everything I’ve learned in audiology from hearing loss, hearing aids, amplification, audio, sleep, the whole tangle of how hearing shapes our health points back to one idea: your natural hearing is worth protecting. No hearing aid, however good, is ever as good as the hearing you were born with. Our mission at Vancouver Custom Earplugs is to help people keep theirs, sleep better, and find a little more comfort in a loud world along the way.
Who we help
Over the years, the people we help have turned out to be a wonderfully mixed bag:
- Light sleepers and the long-suffering partners of world-class snorers
- Musicians and concert-goers who want to protect their hearing without wrecking the music
- Tradespeople and industrial workers who need real, all-day protection that meets the standards
- Motorcycle riders fighting wind noise at highway speed
- Shooters, dentists, swimmers, and anyone simply worn down by a loud world
We’re also an authorized dealer/preferred audiologist for the in-ear monitor brands: JH Audio, 64 Audio, and Ultimate Ears. We take the ear impressions those custom IEMs are built from.
