Hard water affects hair and skin in cities across the world—but until recently, most people blamed their shampoo. Karlee Zhang and Omer Ozener founded Hello Klean in 2020 after Karlee spent years moving between New York, London, Paris, Istanbul, Dubai, and Berlin, experiencing a different set of hair and skin problems in each city before eventually tracing them all back to the same cause: water.
What followed was a category-creation story built on £60,000 of personal capital, a free trial that could have gone badly, and a subscriber base that now tops 90,000. Karlee and Omer share how they built it.
On the problem hiding in plain sight:
Karlee: I kept moving around, and every single time I moved, I was suffering [with my] hair and skin, quite a lot. The symptoms were different each time. In Dubai, it was a lot of hair loss. When I was studying in Paris, I had a really dry patch on my leg that just wouldn’t go away. The first place I looked was my beauty products. I changed my lotions and serums. Eventually, I went to a dermatologist. It was actually on Quora that I learned it was the water composition—hard water in particular—that was causing all of these issues.
That was an aha moment for me. There was an answer. And coming from marketing and working in beauty, I also thought: I can’t be the only one suffering with this. There’s a real opportunity to address this problem at scale.
On building for a market that doesn’t know it has a problem:
Karlee: Most traditional beauty brands talk about the outcome—what you’re going to get from using a product. For us, most of our effort goes into educating people: What does water actually do to your hair and skin? Once people understand that, it becomes a no-brainer. It’s the foundation.
Omer: It’s almost like aha moments we hear constantly. When people understand, they say, “Of course, it makes so much sense. If you’re filtering your drinking water, of course you should filter your shower water as well.” But getting to that stage takes some time.
The culture hasn’t quite caught up to the science—it’s like sunscreen awareness in the early days. That’s the challenge. It’s also the opportunity.
On the one question that converts skeptics:
Karlee: Instead of getting into lime scale levels and water hardness metrics and all of that technical stuff, we ask one really simple question: Has your hair and skin felt really different when you were on vacation?
Most of the time, the answer is yes. If you live in LA and you go to New York for a weekend, the way your hair feels after each shower is completely different—even though the products are the same. New York has softer water. LA and California are harder water areas. Hard water is loaded with minerals like calcium and magnesium, plus heavy metals like iron and copper. When you’re using the same shampoo in hard water, it takes longer to lather, the bubbles feel dense, and the soap doesn’t rinse off as cleanly.
That question lands, and then people get it immediately.
On putting more than half of their first £60K into marketing:
Omer: A lot of first-time founders underestimate the marketing investment needed to educate a customer and get the initial reach you need. For us, we knew this category required a lot of education—building content, working with creators, advertising on Instagram. That was more than 50% of our total budget. The remaining went to production and working with manufacturers, where we had good terms, so the initial investment was low.
Most of our first capital went toward making people understand the problem existed—before we could even start selling the solution.
On choosing small manufacturers over large ones:
Omer: We started with a typical Alibaba search, then went to Korea and China to visit manufacturers on-site. We still work with our original manufacturer after six years, though now we have more than 20.
We didn’t go with a very large factory because for them, we were very small—they weren’t interested in innovating for us. The smaller factories meant better relationships and more of their resources allocated to our products. That relationship is also one of the key reasons we were able to bootstrap: the payment terms we have with our suppliers helped us preserve cash and keep investing in marketing.
Building that relationship can massively change your business. From payment terms, to the flexibility, to the prices—it makes the biggest difference.
On the free trial that built their subscription:
Omer: Subscription was part of the model from day one, but at first it was at market standard— about 15% to 20%. We wanted to increase that. So we tried something very risky: We offered a free trial where you’d get the filter for free, and if you liked it, you’d be charged 30 days later. Try before you buy.
This was 2020, our first year. The risk was real: misuse, unknown churn, return rates we couldn’t predict. We’d paid for the inventory, we were shipping it out, and we weren’t charging anyone for a month.
It worked. Our subscription intake is now above 80%—more than 80% of first-time customers opt into a subscription. That was the first real scaling attempt, and it helped a lot on the bootstrapping side.
Karlee: We had this belief in the product. We knew it was going to work.
On the founding partnership that makes it all function:
Karlee: Omer is good at everything I’m not good at. He’s amazing at finance, looks after operations, handles all the performance and analytics—the entire backbone that keeps us standing. For me, it’s very much about the look and the feel and product development.
Omer: That’s one of the key things that makes our partnership work: the distinction of skills, and how distinct they are. There’s not too much involvement in each other’s area. I leave everything creative to Karlee, and I have full trust in her. And the other way around. That trust is really important in a partnership.
For more on Hello Klean’s influencer strategy—including how Karlee segments tastemakers from conversion creators, why a eucalyptus wreath class outperformed any product-push event, and to hear Omer break down exactly what Hello Klean brings to Brita that a 60-year-old filtration company couldn’t build on its own—catch the full episode on Shopify Masters.
