Dr. Noze Best’s Export Advantage: Its Product Really Sucks

Christy Brown is no stranger to the challenges of international business, having managed a team of 2,000 across three cities around the world in previous executive roles. 

But as an entrepreneur breaking into new markets with a medical device, particularly one focused on children, they show up differently. 

“I’ve had a ton of global experience, but nothing can prepare you for going global with a baby product,” the CEO and co-founder of Dr. Noze Best told Global Atlanta.

Ms. Brown is coming off a string of professional wins over the past year. In late 2024, she took home a second $5,000 grant in the Metro Export Challenge pitch competition to open new markets for Dr. Noze Best’s products, including the flagship NozeBot device offering “hospital-grade suction” for parents and providers alike. 

She then was selected as an Endeavor entrepreneur, gaining entry into a selective program focused on developing executives at the helm of high-potential scale-ups. 

More recently, she was named one of EY’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women, joining an international cohort of female leaders picked by the accounting and advisory giant. 

All the while, Ms. Brown has remained focused on the company’s guiding principle: broadening access to the best nasal aspiration for kids, far beyond the blue bulb provided by the hospital. 

“The biggest North Star for us has always been: get it into the hands of parents,” she told Global Atlanta. 

Other electronic options are out there, but Ms. Brown and Dr. Steven Goudy — the pediatric ENT who developed the device and co-founded the company — say their innovation is in a different league. 

“It was a market mover — it’s what every other person in our category wants to have,” she said. 

Perhaps that’s why increasingly, and unexpectedly, demand has popped up far outside U.S. borders.

“When we went to market a few years ago, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, we’ll got straight Europe, Canada and Australia,’” she said. “That was really not the DNA. It was: Saturate the U.S. We just had organic requests in these markets.” 

Pretty soon, those inquiries reached a point where it made sense to at least explore fulfilling the demand. Once the company’s quality and processes were audited via the Medical Device Single Audit Program, the jump to other MDSAP markets like Australia and Canada wasn’t too far.  

Still, compliance is costly, and the company is having to learn about setting up distributor relationships in markets where the retail landscape vastly differs from that of the U.S. 

Here, it’s all about omni-channel, Ms. Brown said. Many NozeBots are purchased at 2 a.m. on Amazon when parents have that “Oh my God” moment as their child is having trouble breathing, sleeping, or more likely, some combination of the two. 

But others buy it as a preventative product, and they want to able to walk into a retail outlet like Walmart or simply visit the Dr. Noze Best website. 

There’s also a clinical angle, where the device is sold to health care providers, particularly in areas underserved by hospitals, to provide suction for patients when those expensive machines and beds are unavailable. And the NozeBot qualifies for Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts, another option that may not be available overseas.

Going to market will differ across jurisdictions, and Dr. Noze Best foresees leaning on the expertise of distributors, vetted with help from the Small Business Development Center and the U.S. Commercial Service, to solve that equation. 

Meanwhile, the company has been slowly plotting out plans beyond it current three markets. For that, the CFO has created an internal model the team calls the “complexity calculator,” a scoring rubric grading countries on population, birth rate, disposable income and other factors. 

Europe is next on the list, though the company has pumped the brakes on the process of obtaining its CE mark, similar to FDA approval, which would allow it to sell the medical device in the market of 27 countries. 

That’s less about tariffs and more about ensuring resources are well spent, Ms. Brown said. 

“Taking a step back to speed up has been the approach in the EU,” she said, noting lessons from the experience in other markets. 

That’s not unique to Dr. Noze Best. Opportunity costs often waylay would-be exporters, as the unproven potential of international sales competes with what’s close at hand. 

Pursuing exports, ironically, has helped the company win U.S. deals. Funded by the Metro Export Challenge, Dr. Noze Best attended the Medica conference in Duesseldorf, Germany, and landed a deal with Ohio-based Bionix to provide its electronic clinical ear curette, based on the NozeBot framework. That could eventually lead, in a roundabout way, to sales in overseas markets. 

For now, Dr. Noze Best is left to negotitate an uncertian tariff environment. Its product is manufactured in northern Vietnam, which was threatened with a 46 percent levy before negotiations brought the rate down to 20 percent. But the prospect of further inflation has taken a toll on consumer sentiment. 

“There is a lot of focus on what the consumer is thinking,” says Ms. Brown, noting that people are no longer worried just about the price of eggs, but their whole grocery budgets. That has led the company to engage in price testing with its retail partners and to evaluate its supply chains. 

In Canada, Dr. Noze Best has sidestepped retaliatory tariffs by fulfilling through Amazon. 

Eventually, Ms. Brown said, the company will consider a physical presence, whether warehousing or offices, in the markets where it operates, but that will come later as volumes rise, Ms. Brown said. Right now, the company thinks 10 percent export sales is a nice equilibrium. 

“We’ve bitten off enough right now, and we will let this digest and make sure we are successful in these markets and countries, make sure we have access to the right resources.”