By Garrett Dvorkin | Baltimore Business Journal
Former Ravens wide receiver Mark Clayton has raised more than $1 million to create a new type of headphone designed to stay on during even the hardest workout.
Clayton released a new version of his LIVV Audio over-ear headphones on Dec. 1. The company has received backing from investors like tennis legend Mark Knowles and hopes to sell 6,000 pairs in the first year. The release caps off more than a decade of work for Clayton, who first got the idea for the headphones during his NFL days and battled through several setbacks with the first version of the product.
“There were growing pains. I had to learn manufacturing, learn supply chains, consumer electronics,” Clayton said. “Coming from football, I didn’t know how to do any of that. I made some mistakes along the way, but that allowed me to get a solid base and apply that to making Livv successful this time around.”
The headphones retail for $350 and are designed to be a more commercially appealing version of the LIVV headphones that Clayton started selling back in 2016. He said the new version is “sexy” and aimed at capturing a wider audience.
Clayton came up with the first version of the headphones while still in the NFL. A first-round pick out
of the University of Oklahoma, Clayton spent five seasons with the Ravens from 2005-2009 and still ranks fifth all-time in catches and receiving yards for the team. After Baltimore, Clayton signed with the St. Louis Rams but only played five games before rupturing his patella tendon. He spent the rest of the 2010 season rehabbing his injury and started going through pair after pair of headphones because they kept falling off during his rehab drills.
That gave Clayton the idea to make his own. Clayton was an architecture student at Oklahoma and used his drawing skills to sketch out designs that would make over-ear headphones stay on his head. He landed on a design that used a tight headband that connected with the speaker cups from the front. Moving the connection forward gives the headphones more surface area to stick on the head.
It took Clayton a couple of years to go from a design to a 3D model to an actual sample of the product. He launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 that raised $100,000 to help fund an order for 1,000 headphones from a manufacturing facility in China.
The Chinese facility, however, caused its fair share of headaches. The headphones were delayed many times and the delivery got pushed back to 2018. Shortly after the headphones were delivered, Clayton said he received an email from a customer telling him about an issue with the headphones. It turned out that a third of the 1,000 headphones needed to be recalled.
“At that point, I’d spent $350,000 on these headphones. I decided I needed a break,” Clayton said. “So I went and coached at Nolan Catholic [High School in Texas]. I thought, ‘This is too much,’ and that I needed to go and do something else.”
During his time coaching, Clayton started thinking about how he could make his headphones more appealing to a wider audience. He ended up golfing with a friend of a friend from Oklahoma who inspired him to give the headphones another shot and connected him with Knowles, a former No. 1 ranked tennis player.
The second time around, Clayton decided to team up with more established names to launch the product. The headphones were incubated by JLab Audio, a company known for more affordable headphones. Clayton also decided to take the headphones in a different direction and designed the new product to look better and have a little less functionality.
“When you show people the first model, there is a knee-jerk reaction. These new headphones look more premium and luxury,” Clayton said. “The first headphones would stay on if you did a backflip, but not that many people need headphones that can do that. These are secure enough, while also having mass appeal.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of LIVV Audio
Issue 290: December 2024 / January 2025
Originally published Dec. 18, 2024