How Haven Lough Turned 5 Million Followers Into a Skincare Brand That Sold Out in 24 Hours

0:00Haven Lough:You might recognize Haven Lough from his viral videos that have helped him build an audience of over 5 million followers across social media. But while content creation was his first passion, Haven is now spending more time on his second one, skincare. And his obsession with skin runs deep. So deep that Haven skipped his last two years of high school to start college early, with one goal in mind, to become a dermatologist. While studying, Haven noticed something, his audience was spending almost all of their money on skincare, but the products they were buying were popular, not healthy. So he decided to build something better.

0:30Haven Lough:And unlike most creators who slap their name on a product and cut corners, he spent two years working with a lab, chemist, and manufacturers to do it properly. The result sold out in 24 hours. And on today's episode of the Hot Start Podcast, Haven tells the full story. Haven, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Nice to meet you. Yeah, likewise. Before we talk about your skincare brand, I want to actually talk about your journey as a content creator. So when did you start creating content and what inspired that? I started making content during like COVID in high school. I just was having some fun making some videos.

1:02The first videos weren't really high quality or anything. They're kind of trendy. Some were thirst traps. You know, I have a mask on. I'll take the mask off in the school bathroom. It wasn't anything to be proud of, but it got me. I start. And then from there, I kind of started posting every day. I fell in love with social media. It was back when social media wasn't really cool. So it wasn't as saturated as it is now. I got my foot in the door. And then after that, you know, it's kind of just never stopped and no one ever caught up really.

1:26Haven Lough:Yeah. And how is your content evolved over time from the thirst traps to the podcast, for example, that you used to host? Yeah. So I'd say that's like my biggest strength is evolving and adapting. I think a lot of content creators get stuck in one niche or one vertical and they can't really make content outside of it or they're scared to try new things. And the way I build my audience is it's all about my life. So whatever's going on in my life, I capture that moment and they know that. Like, I don't just make food content. I don't just make couple content. I just document my life. Instead of just making content, I'm more documenting.

1:58I'm not producing, I'm documenting. I think that's what's helped me kind of stay relevant and staying on trends, but also staying with who I am as a person. As I grow and change and go through high school, go through college, it's been able to continue to grow my audience instead of having to build a brand new one.

2:12Haven Lough:Yeah, and in addition to a content creator, you're also an entrepreneur. You started several companies. Did you kind of always thought that you wanted to build your own audience and then eventually leverage that to build companies on top of it? Or was that not the plan at all? So I've always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I never thought originally when I started making videos that it would be an audience to leverage, but it's been a huge tool for that. I've always wanted to do my own thing, start my own businesses. I never wanted to be bossed around. And I mean, since I was like 13 years old, I had business cards because I was like really good with technology.

2:43So I would help people out with technology. And I've started some other small businesses as I grew before content. and then when I saw the power of content, I mean, the attention you have without having to pay for ads or anything, I was like, this is a huge tool. I could really use this in my entrepreneurial ventures. And also I view content as a very entrepreneurial business as well because every single piece of content you're putting out is a new business almost. It's a new theory, it's a new concept and each time you are seeing how the world reacts to it, like you're competing versus the whole world just like other businesses and you're seeing how it reacts to it and you learn so much about people's attention, so much about what people like, don't like, You get to interact with people.

3:20You get to truly see the foundations of business in content, I believe.

3:24Haven Lough:Yeah. Is that also something that you kind of use, like your audience, to validate business models? Like whenever you have an idea, instead of like working on it for six months, you're like, hey, I thought about this idea. Let me first check in with my audience, share it. And then if you get some positive reactions from it, then you actually start developing further. A hundred percent. I think it's super important to build a story. so I want my audience, whatever I do, whatever product, whatever business I start, I want them to be along for the story so they feel attached to it and they want to support that story.

3:52So even if the product isn't something they would normally buy, they still want to support the business. So you're making sure not to alienate any of your audience. I have a skincare brand, but if I made it, say for example, I made it just for girls. If I made it just for girls and I didn't really document that story, maybe we'll attach the brand, all the guys in my audience probably wouldn't ever buy it and only girls would buy it. But if I document that story, maybe the guys would buy it for their girlfriends or their moms. They would try to find a way to support the brand because they're part of the story.

4:15And I think what it sells right now is a story. That's like the most important thing. Any brand right now, it's the story, I believe.

4:20Haven Lough:Yeah, no, I love that. When I was kind of researching and preparing for this podcast, I saw that one of the businesses that you launched was a puppy yoga studio. So can you tell me more about that? Puppy yoga is by far the most profitable venture I've ever done. It's not the most money-making one for me, but when it comes to profit and business economics, puppy yoga is really fun. I just haven't had that much time on it. But basically what you do, I'll tell you how the business works and I'll tell you how I made it. Basically, the business itself is where, actually, I'm going to go the other way around.

4:48I'm going to tell you how I had the idea and then why it works. So I had the idea. I took my girlfriend on a puppy yoga date and I was like, this is so much more boring than it is. It's not a cool environment. The puppies are all the same breed and it's not really that saturated. So I was like, what if we just do this better? My girlfriend wanted to be a vet at the time. So I was like, this could also be a great extracurricular for you if you were part of this. So we went to some puppy stores. We said, hey, what if we marketed your puppies? We spent, we had customers spend an hour of time or any random person spent an hour of time with these puppies.

5:18And then we would just literally market them for free. You just let us use your puppies. And all our overhead was the facility and the yoga instructor. And outside of that, everything's pure profit. The marketing is free because I have social media presence and my audience is typically a little bit younger and they would love to do puppy yoga. So the business itself works really well because you market the puppies. So you don't have to pay for puppies. You just need a space and an instructor. So it's really nice.

5:41Haven Lough:Very interesting. I didn't even think about the whole adoption process as well. Like, do you have any stats on how many pups already got adopted after like a yoga lesson? So, I mean, we've had a few, but honestly, that's what I was saying earlier. It's the most profitable business venture I've done, but I haven't put that much time into it because I've really realized that stretching yourself out too thin doesn't really work. The puppy yoga business, I've done probably like less than eight classes with my girlfriend because first off, we both want to be there and we have very different schedules.

6:08And then also it's more like a fun passion project. if we really wanted to take it to the business side i think that would just take a lot more time from my end because that's where i would go out really a lot locally and do a lot of local guerrilla marketing and stuff like that so right now it's kind of like a passion project but if anyone wants to start a pop yoga business it's very profitable and it works so i'd definitely recommend it's just something that high person of the time to do at this very moment hey quick one before we get back

6:31Haven Lough:to the episode if you love conversations like this one you would love the fame game our weekly newsletter in which we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands sign up for free via the link in the description. And now back to the episode. Yeah, it's also hard to scale, right? All these physical locations and that type of stuff. And the power of a creator is obviously that you have millions of followers in your pocket, basically. So yeah, let's talk about your skincare company. So what is Haven and what's also the founding story behind it? Awesome. Yeah, I'll give you the story behind it.

7:00So Haven is a skincare brand. It's also my name. It's a safe sanctuary for your skin as it applies. And the story of how I found it was there's two parts. First off, I left high school two years early to go to college early because I've always wanted to be a dermatologist. So I've always been passionate about skin. It started when I was a kid. I would watch pimple popping videos. And ever since then, I've just always loved like skin. I've always been interested in it. I always want to be a dermatologist. I've always had passion for skin. At the same time, I'm in college, I'm studying, I'm building this audience.

7:29And this audience is, at the time, the same type of audience and same demographic as my sister. My sister's 13 years old. I've learned from living with my sister that she spends all her mom's money on skincare, but she doesn't care about how healthy the ingredients are, purely how popular and cool the brand is. So I was like, okay, I'm passionate about skin. I have an audience that only buys really skincare. Like that's the biggest expense they have. And there's a problem. They don't care about health. They care about popularity. Well, I can provide the popularity and I can provide the health because I research it a lot.

8:01I know a lot of dermatologists. I have a lot of knowledge in the industry, even though I'm not a dermatologist yet. I have a lot of connections in it. So, okay, I have the two answers for this. What if I combine it and make a product that's healthy, targeting my audience, and actually make it look cool and popular, leveraging my audience, but also other influencers I know audience. And that's kind of how I started it. And then we launched Haven exactly a year ago in three days. We sold out in 24 hours. It was a thousand units,$24 a unit plus shipping. And then ever since we've been scaling, we've now had some new SKUs introduced.

8:33We have three lip balms. And our next year we're working on is a gentle daily facial cleanser. And then after that, I think it'd be cool to have maybe a sunscreen or a self tan. And we're kind of just going with the flow and growing as I grow my audience as well.

8:46Haven Lough:Yeah. And how did that kind of passion for skincare came about? Because you mentioned that you were looking at these videos of pimples being popped. But there had to be like another type of passion that was kind of developed by like doing a lot of research and finding out that a lot of these skincare products are not healthy for you whatsoever. So can you talk us more about the passion of skincare? So I was watching those pimping videos. And first off, the shows that we show them would tell you kind of what's going on, like if it's a cyst, if it's a pimple, what it really is, why it's there. So I kind of started learning about skin as I was watching these videos.

9:17So I was kind of learning a lot, becoming familiar with it as I was watching them. At the same time, I was going through my team phases where everybody has acne, everybody's breaking out. And I felt really cool when I would tell someone, you know, hey, this is why you have a pimple there. This is how it works. I like loved knowing that knowledge because that's what everyone cared about. Everyone cares about their appearance and everyone wants the acne and pimples to go away. So like the more knowledge I knew about it, the more fun it was to help teach other people. I've always loved just like teaching people and helping them out.

9:43So that was really fun. That made me just kind of want to keep learning, keep getting more knowledge. So I could honestly just help more of my friends. And at the same time, like I was getting my own acne. It was great to help with my own acne. It's like, I know this, I can do this. That's where the passion for skin really developed. and then ingredients wise i'm very like health freak i don't like touching receipts i don't like like the artificial dyes and candies i love very healthy stuff so i kind of take that with me everywhere i study the ingredients for the food i consume i study the ingredients for the skincare products i use i'm just very health conscious on ingredients and i mean if you don't want to be health conscious on ingredients like there's other ways to go about it we can still tell if something's healthy like there's apps like you go where you scan a product see how healthy it is and see if it has artificial stuff in it we're not but i started probably using those platforms and i learned from there.

10:27I just did my own research on what ingredients are good and bad, what to look for. And I started cooking my own food. So it's kind of just like an over-encompassing health journey. And that also played into my skincare journey because I cared about what was in my skincare products.

10:39Haven Lough:Yeah. But I love that because I see so many celebrities and creators and they actually launch companies and they don't even have any idea what's inside their ingredients, right? And you clearly really have done your research and have done years of research before you actually launch your own product. So kudos to you on that. I am quite curious because you already brought it up yourself. Your company name is the same as your own first name. And many people always kind of recommend against it. They say like, hey, don't name your brand against yourself. So what is kind of the decision making process there?

11:09So, okay, here's the decision process. First off, Haven is not like a name. It's a word. So my parents were trying to be unique and cool and gave me a name that's not really a name. Like a Scott name, that's a name. Like you hear Scott, you think a name. I feel like people don't think name when they hear Haven. There's movies called Safe Haven. There's the word. So first off, it's on a name, which is a green flag for me. I was obviously a little bit scared to use it. But then also the meaning behind the word directly correlates with the meaning of the brand. Haven means a safe sanctuary. And I'm trying to create a safe sanctuary for your skin.

11:39I'm trying to make healthy, safe products. So I'm like, okay, there's no reason why I should use my name. At the same time, I already have an audience. I'm on social media. So I have exposure on my name. People know my name. it leverages my audience to the utmost I could. So I was like, okay, yes, it sounds a little bit egotistical to use my name, but my name is the absolute most sense it could make.

12:00Haven Lough:Yeah, and I think that actually makes a lot of sense because if you look at like a company, like even behind me, like Chamberlain Coffee, like the name Chamberlain from Emma Chamberlain obviously doesn't resonate with coffee directly, whereas your name indeed, it talks about the safe haven, it talks about safe products or whatsoever. So I completely understand that correlation. So the skincare market is quite saturated. What would you say makes your company meaningfully different from what is available in the market? That's a good question. I would say the skincare market right now is focused on appealing to purely packaging.

12:32Like no one really cares about ingredients. So I think first thing is just our care with ingredients. Second off, I'd say we're targeting sensitive skin in a way that most brands aren't. I'd say most brands are, especially the bigger brands, because if you're in Sephora, if you're in retail, typically without having that personal leverage audience you had to either have really good margins so you can make a profit so really good margins typically means cheaper ingredients so they sacrifice the quality of their ingredients or you just like had a lot of investors and you didn't actually understand it yourself so these people aren't really looking to their ingredients as much and also i would say the biggest separator is because it is that we target sensitive skin and we the other brands don't because we strictly avoid common junk stuff so most brands even if they're forced sensitive skin they have ingredients in there that will typically make your skin worse for like the first two weeks like you'll purge like people with sensitive skin or acne prone skin they will typically break out when they try a new product even if it's for acne so we've like made it a huge focus on supporting your skin and no harsh actives i was trying to find a word to explain the difference the difference is we don't really use harsh actives because we want to support your barrier and not to damage you know a dermatologist should be the only person to We're recommending actives, recommending really high level stuff where it's actually affecting your barrier.

13:43You want to support your barrier with skincare. So we're very gentle and we're for specifically sensitive acne prone skin. And we want to guarantee that you won't break out from trying our product. That's a guarantee. We are not a medication. We're not acutating. We're not going to say your acne is going to go away when you try our product because that's not true with the skincare product. It's not going to go away. But we can promise you that your acne is not going to get worse. It's only going to get better. And this will make you break out. And no other brands can really say that.

14:06Haven Lough:Yeah, I love that. So how long did it take you from like going from an initial ID to kind of like going live almost a year ago? I've had the idea probably three years now. Originally, I started talking to other companies that had skincare brands already. And I was like, what if we had a collab product? And then I was like, I'm gonna do it myself. And like, it took me two years to get the first product out. It was two years idea, formulation, talking to people. Yeah, I'd say two years. And then obviously you launched and you already brought it up yourself. like within 24 hours, you saw completely like you sold out.

14:37Haven Lough:So what was that moment like those initial 24 hours? Because like you've been working at this for years, you hope that your audience is going to resonate with it, but you have no idea for sure, right? So what was those initial 24 hours like that you're looking on your website, you see the Shopify notifications coming in here, like, wow, this actually works. It was awesome. And it was a really cool coincidence because one of my boys was having a birthday party the same day. And his birthday party was on a yacht. So literally when we sold out, I was on a yacht celebrating, which was super sick, which was like the coolest thing ever.

15:08I think it was my first time on a yacht too. My boy was a birthday party. So I was there celebrating at the same time. So it was a surreal experience. It's a really nice to be with people that you love and care about when you accomplish something like that. So I was really excited. And yeah, it was honestly just the biggest indoor dopamine rush I've ever had. I mean, just seeing all that work. It's way more rewarding than getting a brand deal. I didn't make any profit on it. I lost money when we sold out. I didn't make any money at all. I still haven't pulled out any money. It was purely just seeing the hard work come to light and like actually work.

15:40Haven Lough:Yeah, I heard this story so many times. Like it's so much more rewarding if you can sell a product for$5 yourself, but you made it actually than selling someone else's product for like$100. So yeah, I completely resonate with that. So yeah, you have millions of followers as a content creator. How have you been able to leverage your own platform and your audience to launch and scale haven? So leveraging my audience was making sure that I stayed in touch with what they watch, what they listen to. So the creators they're watching, I'm collabing with them. The trends they're watching, I'm integrating my product into the trends in a fun way.

16:13Like back then, I did some more dance content. So I would like have a collab and then say dance for a free bottle of Haven Skin. So I didn't make everything just super addy and super like, this is why you should buy this is more fun entertainment mixed in at the top of the funnel. You know, our strategy was make a viral content, get a lot of exposure, make it at the top of the funnel and then have other people create honest reviews where they search up and look for those videos. And those videos are what convert and sell. You know, I'm here to provide exposure, but other people are really the ones that are selling the product because they're not me.

16:50so people trust them more.

16:51Haven Lough:Yeah, and have you also been able to leverage your audience, for example, with product development, like coming up with new flavors or new SKUs or new product lines in general? I survey my audience on everything. So I always ask them, what products do you want next? What flavors, what colors, what packaging? I ask them literally everything. I think it's the best thing to have them answer because people that answer also are likely to buy once they see it. Yeah, 100%, right? Because they kind of feel that they're part of the whole process. So yeah, they're already buying in, even if they click a quick poll whatsoever.

17:20Haven Lough:and you can also kind of see who answered the poll. And then if they said, hey, I like this specific flavor or this specific packaging, when you actually follow their advice, you can follow up with them and say, hey, we listened to you and we actually now created exactly what you asked for. So, hey, here's, by the way, a link with a 10 or 20 % discount in exchange for you being part of it and helping us develop it. So yeah, 100 % see that. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's a huge tool. I think the future of entrepreneurship requires people to kind of be on social media and tell their story and leverage the audience, but also work with the audience and build it with people.

17:55Haven Lough:Yeah. And you also started to already work with other creators, like you were working already with an AI content creator, Granny Spills. So tell me the story about that. Why do you think that an AI influencer was like the right influencer to start partnering with? So, okay, that's a fun story. My buddy, actually, Eric Suris and Adam Vassarstein, two buddies, they actually founded Granny Spills, the biggest growing AI influencer in the entire world. And while she was growing, I was working on making some lip balms. And I was like, well, I have never seen an AI influencer with their own product.