After making the decision to develop new branding for our company, we struggled to come up with something that met all of our criteria. In addition to representing our purpose for being in business, we wanted something that was easy to remember, easy to recognize and easy to sign.


Around that time, several of our executives got together for dinner at the home of Tim Rarus, our vice president of sales. That evening, Tim and his wife, Brandi, introduced us to their daughter Zoë, and they shared her story with us. Tim and Brandi already had three hearing boys. They wanted a daughter to complete their family and were planning to adopt a girl from China. During the process, they were contacted about a deaf girl in Minnesota who had already lived in four different homes during the first six months of her life.

The family selected to adopt her learned that she was deaf and decided they were not the right match for her, so she was placed in foster care. 

Tim and Brandi immediately sent in their application to adopt Zoë, and the rest is history. Who better for a deaf child than two deaf parents? Zoë surely landed in the perfect home, and Tim and Brandi found themselves the perfect daughter.

Our vice president of marketing was really touched by Zoë’s story that night. The next day, he proposed we take the first letter of her name and make “Z” the new logo for our company and products. Everyone was immediately on board, leading to our new branding of Z products and ZVRS. 

Zoë’s story is what The Z® is all about. All of us at The Z come to work each day to contribute to better technology that improves the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people. We do that for many reasons, but even more so for children like Zoë. Our work allows them to lead fully productive lives by providing them with tools for communication accessibility. Zoë symbolizes for us those deaf children in America who can be anything they want to be. To know we play a part of that at The Z makes all of us proud.