15 years of being open

Rowynn was ten when she got her first pair of AfterShokz. She's eighteen now, and the little device is worn through.
She was born with hearing in only one ear, something a kindergarten screening caught before she did. She can't tell where a sound comes from, and a loud restaurant can overwhelm her. Her mom worried about her living alone. The easy path would have been to pull back from noise and crowds. But Rowynn is made of stronger stuff.
Shokz’s bone conduction headphones gave her something hearing aids couldn't. She could actually listen to music and still stay aware of the world around her. She heard her mom calling from the kitchen. She heard the ocean on a surfboard and the scratch of a pencil in art class. A restaurant job is still hard, but she's no longer isolated.
She knew exactly what she wanted. A single-sided, small headphone that is easy to take off when she needed a break from sound. It changed how we think about open-ear design.
So for our 15th year, we went to her. The team sat with her and her mom, who called the visit "a unique gift." We came with a scholarship fund, and a commitment to keep developing single-sided open-ear audio built the way she asked for it, small and easy to take off.
Open-ear audio didn't fix Rowynn's hearing. It let her surf, draw, work, and go to school without shutting the world out to do it. That was the point fifteen years ago too, a way to hear music without closing off from everything around you.

Randy still has the socks. Bright orange and white, "BE OPEN" embroidered across them, from that first AfterShokz campaign. The orange has faded and the white has dulled, but they've survived more than a decade, about as long as Randy has been with Shokz.
His story started with the original wired AfterShokz. When the Trekz Titanium Kickstarter launched, he set an alarm and jumped in the second it opened. Backer #15. Later, the team surprised him with a Bluez 2 headset, a moment he still brings up years later. What made him a lifelong fan wasn't the technology, though. It was the freedom, the first time he could play his music and still hear the world around him.
From there, Shokz worked its way into everything. The office through the workday. Every bike ride after. He talked them up to friends and fellow cyclists until several riders in his community were wearing them too. Today his OpenRun Pro sits alongside his helmet as standard kit on his Pearson Forge, whether he's climbing a quiet road, playing a long ride's soundtrack, or taking a call mid-workday. His bikes have changed. His phones have changed. His career has changed. Shokz has stayed one of the few constants.
He learned "Be Open" as a company line and made it his own. Openness to unfamiliar tech led him to AfterShokz. Openness to a cycling community led to the people and rides that fill his weeks. Openness to a ballroom floor led to years of dancing — teaching, hosting, judging, competing, and friendships he never saw coming. The best things, he'll tell you, start just outside your comfort zone.
So for our 15th year, we're giving something back to backer #15. His favorite ride is Crater Lake — thirty-plus miles, three thousand feet of climbing, rimmed by a blue he calls the most honest color he knows. We're sending the team to ride it with him, cameras rolling.
And the next door he dreams of opening? A multi-day journey through somewhere iconic — the Italian Alps, the Pacific Coast. We left that one open on purpose.

Ken Stevenson had made peace with the idea that running was behind him.
In his 20s, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu accident left him with a spiral fracture of the tibia and a broken fibula. He still has a nail running the length of his shin, held by three screws. He kept training for another decade and earned his black belt, but the pain never fully left. He took up road cycling to hold onto his fitness and mostly accepted that running was over.
Then his physical therapist, a triathlete who'd been told thirty years earlier he'd never run again, and found his own way back, asked one day whether Ken would try a triathlon. Ken laughed. He still wasn't sure he could run at all.
But the PT taught him to run at a higher cadence, right around 90 beats per minute. That's where the music came in. Ken grew up on classical piano and guitar, so tempo has always made sense to him. He took long DJ sets, tuned them to 88–90 BPM, and loaded them onto his Shokz to move with the rhythm. He's built more than a thousand training tracks that way.
Nearly eight years on, he's raced several seasons of short-course triathlon, won his age group, qualified for Nationals, and is close to his first half-Ironman.
But running wasn't the hardest part. Open-water swimming was. Alone in a murky Texas lake, his mind invented things beneath him. So he did what he knew: cut a section of hip-hop that made him feel strong, looped it to his 60 BPM stroke rate, and loaded it onto his waterproof Shokz. Now he swims across the lake alone, one stroke at a time, a beat pulling him forward, 800 to 900 swim tracks in and still counting.
Yes, Shokz soundtracked his training, but the open-ear headphones were crucial to the system that got him running again, and, more unexpectedly, comfortable alone in open water. His definition of "Be Open" fits the whole arc: full acceptance of what is, instead of what you wish it were.

Lexie Mercier signed up for a Ragnar on a friend's recommendation, and that same friend pointed her to Shokz. More than five years later, running is still hers, and now she has company for some of it.
Four years ago she had her son, which meant two surgeries and a slower road back. Running had always been her place, and she found her way to it again. Some runs are still solo. But others are with her son in the stroller, her little run buddy, happy to be included.
That mix is what "Be Open" means to her. She can push the stroller uphill with her music going and still talk with her son the whole way. She can head out alone and feel safe doing it, aware of the road, the music there without sealing her off from it.
The dream she named is bigger than a morning loop. She wants to run a marathon. It’s still a “someday”, and she is honest that she is not there yet. But she has faced down big races before. Years ago she ran the SeaWheeze in Vancouver, 10,000 runners on a hilly downtown course, after training alone in circles on a flat high school track. It was hard. What carried her was the crowd, cheer stations the whole way, strangers shouting that she could do it. One woman held a sign that read, "Lex, this is everything you worked for. You've got this." The sign wasn't for her. She had no idea who the woman was. But she needed it that day, so she took it. She found the woman on Instagram afterward, who told her to come and get the sign. Lexie kept that sign in her office for 8 years.
We asked whether she raced in mind, or whether it was still just someday. Then we told her someday had a date. We had secured an entry for to the Toronto Marathon in 2027.
Lexie likes proving to herself that she can do hard things, and now, she gets to show her son you can do anything you set your mind to.