How Wardah Solved a Hearing Aid Problem the Global Industry Ignored

A beauty brand just built a hearing aid. It might be the most important piece of product design to come out of Southeast Asia this year.

Indonesian brand Wardah, in partnership with dentsu Indonesia and Digital Nativ, launched "Hear in Hijab" in May 2026. It's a 12-gram brooch pin that captures sound from outside the hijab and wirelessly transmits it to the wearer's ear at up to 100dB clarity. The goal: fix a problem that the global hearing aid industry had simply never bothered to solve.

A market gap hiding in plain sight

One in three Indonesian women aged 50 and above experiences partial hearing loss. That's a massive number in a country of 270 million people, more than five million of whom live with some degree of hearing impairment.

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But conventional hearing aids sit inside or behind the ear, exactly where hijab fabric wraps. The fabric reduces sound clarity and, according to campaign data from Wardah and dentsu, can increase the risk of falls by up to 60%. Global manufacturers had designed for one universal body. They had never asked whether that body wore a hijab.

That's the gap Wardah stepped into.

Designing around the user, not the other way around

The product logic is simple but the intent behind it matters. Rather than asking hijab-wearing women to modify their dress or compromise their faith, the device was built around how they already live. The brooch sits on the outside of the fabric. Sound passes through unobstructed. The user doesn't have to choose between hearing clearly and dressing as her faith requires.

Khikin Indahsari, Group Head of New Brand Innovation at ParagonCorp (Wardah's parent company), put it plainly: "Wardah has always believed that beauty is for every woman, at every stage of life. Our mission has always been to stand for Indonesian women in ways that matter beyond the product and Hear in Hijab is the most direct expression of that."

Defri Dwipaputra, Chief Creative and Experience Officer at dentsu Creative Indonesia, framed the work as a design and cultural responsibility: "Indonesia is a market with layered lives, deep faith, and needs that resist easy generalization. Innovation and technology are instruments for change that can be genuinely good for the people they touch."

Campaign performance and recognition

The campaign has already reached 4.07 million people, with engagement running 10 times above benchmark. Early device recipients reported a 50% reduction in fall risk. The work won the Grand Prix of Medium at Citra Pariwara, Indonesia's most prestigious creative awards.

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These aren't just marketing metrics. They're signals that a culturally grounded product can perform commercially and creatively at the highest level.

What this means for brands across the region

Nearly 90% of consumers in Southeast Asia say brands must respect faith traditions in their products and communications. Muslim consumers globally represent more than US$2.4 trillion in spending power. Yet as recently as 2021, agencies in the region reported that brands in Southeast Asia rarely briefed them on inclusive or diverse creative work.

Wardah's move isn't charity. It's strategy. The brand has already overtaken Unilever and L'Oreal in popularity across Southeast Asia by positioning itself around halal values and hijab-inclusive design. Hear in Hijab extends that logic from beauty into health technology, showing that a domestic brand with deep cultural intelligence can move into adjacent categories that multinationals have left empty.

The real takeaway for APAC communications and marketing leaders: inclusive design isn't a separate workstream from commercial strategy. When a brand genuinely understands who its customers are, including their faith, their bodies, and their daily realities, the product and the story write themselves.