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Koss Corporation
Koss designs and sells stereo headphones and audio accessories to retailers, distributors, and everyday listeners.
Koss is a headphone company, one of the oldest names in American audio, and it makes its money selling stereo headphones and related accessories. You mostly know it from the wall of a Best Buy or the shelves of a Walmart — affordable wired cans and earbuds, plus a growing line of wireless and Bluetooth models. It sells through distributors, retailers, and directly to consumers, and it actually manufactures much of what it sells at its own factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the company is headquartered.
The business is small and simple. It earns money on the markup between what it costs to build a headphone and what a retailer or shopper pays for it. Customers choose Koss for value and for a certain old-school reputation — the company has been around since 1953 and is famous for its "lifetime warranty" on many models, which is a real selling point when cheap headphones tend to break. Its products are largely assembled in America, which matters to buyers who care about that. That simplicity is also the vulnerability. Koss competes against giant consumer-electronics brands like Sony and Apple, whose AirPods and premium headphones dominate the fast-growing wireless market, and against a flood of low-cost imports. Koss is a tiny player with a market value that has historically swung wildly, sometimes on little more than internet chatter. Revenue has been modest, in the tens of millions of dollars a year, and the company has not reliably turned a profit — it has posted losses in recent years as it spends to build out wireless products. Chief executive Michael Koss has run it for decades, and the founding Koss family still holds a big chunk of the shares.
One odd and famous chapter: in the late 1990s Koss sued its own outside auditor over a fraud that had inflated inventory and profits, and the case became a well-known example of auditors being held to account. Today the company is a small, family-influenced manufacturer betting that American-made audio and a strong warranty can carve out a niche against far bigger rivals. It pays no dividend to speak of and keeps its cash close, funding product development and factory work from its own pocket rather than borrowing heavily.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026