Ashley Landis/Staff Photographer

Ditch the Q-tips: Fort Worth entrepreneur drops a new solution for ear wax

Elyse Dickerson has become an expert in an odd area, thanks to her business -- earwax. She's CEO and co-founder of Eosera, maker of drops that dissolve the sticky wax, which can cause discomfort or muffle sound, especially for hearing aid users.

Dickerson left a sales and marketing job at Alcon, an eye care product company with its U.S. headquarters in Fort Worth, to begin the company in 2015 with toxicologist Joe Griffin, her former colleague. They surveyed medical professionals and tested dozens of formulations in the lab on human wax samples.

Eosera makes an earwax impaction solution, called EarwaxMD, that is sold through hearing aid centers and audiologists and on Amazon.&nbsp;(<p><span style="font-size: 1em; background-color: transparent;">Ashley Landis/Staff Photographer</span><br></p><p></p>)

Ashley Landis/Staff Photographer


The ear drops, called EarwaxMD, are sold over the counter for about $20 and recently debuted on Amazon. Eosera plans to ramp up production to about 36,000 units and hit store shelves at a major nationwide drugstore chain - which Dickerson can't disclose yet - in August. Eventually, Dickerson would like Eosera to make other ear and sinus-related products.

Dickerson spoke about the career twist that got her into the ear care business. Her answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What about health care did you find intriguing?

My father was a physician, so I kind of grew up around health care and talking about health care in the family. I would go on rounds with my dad to the hospitals and see patients being treated, so it was kind of in my DNA as a child. Then, when I started working at Alcon and got to go out and talk to doctors and talk to patients and realized I could change the way these people practice medicine or change the way these patients experience life, it was a really fulfilling occupation.

What inspired you to start a company?

Like all big companies, there were a lot of changes happening within Alcon. A bigger company bought Alcon. I would say there became this relentless focus on the bottom line, meaning profits. ... I saw that happening not just at Alcon, but in the industry all over. Whether it was the employees, or the patients or the doctors, they were all being left out of the equation and it really became about "How much money did you deliver to my bottom line today?" That didn't bring me a lot of joy or fulfillment.

When we [co-founder Joe Griffin and I] left, we said, "We can start something, and we can make the culture something really special."

Of all things you brainstormed, how did you decide on ear drops?

One thing I think Alcon really taught me was to let the market tell you what the need is, rather than trying to create something and push it into the market. Let the market tell you what it needs and then go develop it. ... We spent several months talking to doctors and talking to patients. So we had circled five or six key ideas and then went out and started talking about these ideas.

It was a wide-open space, nobody is paying attention to it, and it's a big unmet need. So it was kind of a win-win for a small company that doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars to go compete with a Pfizer or a huge company like that. It was a great niche that we could go and hit hard.

Earwax is not something most people think about. Why do you think it kept coming up in your conversations with doctors and patients?

You would be amazed. It's one of these topics that nobody talks about until somebody brings it up - and nobody brings it up. So it's not like you're talking to your best friend about earwax. You just don't. But when you bring it up, they say, 'Oh, I had the worst problem.' Or somebody in their immediate vicinity does, whether it's their child or their husband or their parent.

The biggest statistic that set us on the path was that 18 million people a year in the United States are going to the doctor to have earwax removed. That's on top of all of the people who are self-treating off the shelf.

Fighting earwax isn't something that gets a lot of people riled up. What makes you enthusiastic about it? Why do you feel like your product matters?

One of the main symptoms of earwax impaction is hearing loss, so you can imagine your membrane is completely covered, and so sounds can't get through it. That made me really sad, to think that people are walking around and can't hear. A lot of them don't know it's because of wax, so some people go to the doctor thinking they're truly losing their hearing.

There's so many people suffering, and it's an easy thing to fix.

Why did you decide to sell on Amazon first?

One thing I've learned, especially being small, is you don't want to launch too big, too fast. So with any startup or with any product launch, there are going to be problems. That's just how it goes. I felt like if we started small through audiology centers and Amazon, it was very controllable.

For example, we sold maybe 600 units and two of them came back and were leaking. That gives us time to really evaluate the cap and the label and everything. We want things to be perfect, and if they're not perfect at the start, we are going to make them perfect.



Age: 42

Hometown: Grew up in Fort Worth and still lives there

Education: Received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design at University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business

Family: Married to husband, C.D. Dickerson, has a 11-year-old son, Simon, a 9-year-old daughter, Amelia, and a rescue dog that’s a bichon named Cubby