Healf are a rapidly scaling UK health tech brand founded by brothers Max Clarke and Lestat McCree – two young entrepreneurs on a mission to empower wellbeing. Sparked by their own personal health challenges and frustrations with endless medical referrals without a solution, the pair founded Healf in 2020.
Max and Lestat wanted to offer a curated and holistic platform with the best wellness products from around the world. From just 40 brands at launch to over 400 today, Healf now provides more than 5,000 highly-vetted products to help keep customers’ minds and bodies healthy.
At the heart of Healf’s journey is Shopify, which has powered their platform from day one. With Shopify, Healf have achieved:
- 3x revenue in a single year
- 3yr CAGR of 500%+
- 5,000+ SKUs on sale with more to come
The Challenge: From personal struggles to public mission
Healf wasn’t born in a boardroom – it was born from personal experience. Max suffered from chronic nosebleeds, navigating a maze of doctors, specialists and ultimately ineffective advice. Lestat, meanwhile, faced significant injuries during high-performance training that left him struggling with mobility for six months.
Frustrated, the brothers took a proactive approach to getting better, exploring holistic solutions grounded in nutrition, rest, movement and mindset.
Yet as they began searching for quality wellness products, they discovered a fragmented and confusing market with many products lacking transparency over ingredients or scientific credibility. They realised there was no single destination that curated only the best wellbeing solutions – and saw the opportunity to build that destination themselves by creating Healf.
Today, the brand is much more than a store. It offers. a place for people to truly learn about wellbeing and be empowered to take control over personal health, driven by The Four Pillars™: Eat, Move, Mind, and Sleep.
But turning this ethos into reality required more than belief. In those early days, with both founders still in day jobs, they needed an ecommerce platform that was intuitive to launch, flexible to grow and powerful enough to scale with their ambition.
The Solution: Building a curated marketplace on flexible foundations
Max and Lestat chose Shopify ahead of Healf’s launch in 2021 for its simplicity, integrations and seamless scalability. Max had seen the platform drive success in his previous role at Huel, which helped influence the decision. As he recalls, “It was a bit of a no-brainer. We’d seen what Shopify could do, and when you add in how easy it was to build and run a store, it just made sense.”
Shopify supported Healf through every phase of growth. They began with out-of-the-box themes and gradually customised and extended their use of the platform. Throughout that transformation, Shopify provided the stability, APIs and app integrations needed to iterate and improve the experience without friction. It’s also enabled them to provide a consistent customer experience, as Oscar Guy, Head of Brand, highlights: “As a retailer, getting our brand across through engaging design is crucial – it’s been really simple to do that with Shopify.”
Behind the scenes, Shopify’s powerful integrations enabled Healf to quickly add new experiences and operate like a much larger business. They adopted Shopify Payments to simplify checkouts, enabling them to easily accept credit or debit cards as they scaled up. By also adding Apple Pay to Shopify Payments, and buy now and pay later plugins with services such as Klarna, they’ve been able to offer a range of options to suit their customers’ needs. As Max notes, “it’s so important to have the ability to plug-in new features so we can stay at the forefront of ecommerce experiences for our customers.”
Alongside these payment features, Healf use Recharge for subscriptions and Matrixify to handle complex merchandising across thousands of SKUs. As the product library expanded from 250 SKUs to over 5,000, this flexible foundation proved critical. The team used tagging, automation and custom collection pages to merchandise effectively and scale without losing the personalised and curated feel that defines Healf’s brand.
Data is a huge part of our business. Shopify makes it easy to get all the data we need in any format and visualise it so that we can make the right decisions for the wellbeing of our customers.
They also use Klaviyo to power customer engagement, while tools like Snowball and Archive support editorial marketing and influencer programs. In Healf’s early days, editorial content was also built using Shopify’s native tools and Bloggle. Expanding on these efforts, they’ve recently launched Healf Source – a fully-fledged educational platform to further support and inform their community. It runs through their headless frontend while remaining tightly linked to Shopify’s backend infrastructure. Using these tools has been crucial, enabling them to truly understand and engage with their community.
Whenever we’ve had a customer experience challenge, there’s been a Shopify app – or often several – that don’t just solve it, but actually elevate the experience.
The Results: Exponential growth
When Oscar joined Healf two years ago, the company had just seven employees. Today, the team numbers over 100. Sitewide, the product range has grown more than twentyfold. In 2024 alone, Healf tripled its revenue. In 2025, they are on track to reach £100 million in sales – all within the UK market. Shopify didn’t just keep up with this rocketing growth, it enabled the pace.
Shopify’s ecosystem has driven up results for everything from affiliate marketing programs through Shopify Collabs to streamlining friend code sharing to boost subscriptions. Meanwhile, advanced tools like Shopify’s product recommendations ensure that collection pages dynamically adapt to user preferences – delivering personalised discovery at scale. This has not only improved conversion but also reinforced Healf’s position as a trusted, intelligent wellbeing guide.
Their next frontier? Alongside ambitions to expand to new markets, Healf is launching Healf Zone, a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered membership experience designed to give its members total clarity about how to improve their wellbeing. Healf Zone leverages at-home blood testing, algorithm-driven product recommendations, and expert guidance to bring a new depth to personalised wellbeing.This will act as both a new educational tool and a way to connect Healf’s customers with the perfect products on their ecommerce site – with these recommendations made easier thanks to the seamless SKU management Shopify provides.
With Healf making significant moves into health tech, continuing to grow rapidly and finalising plans to enter new markets, they’re poised to take true wellbeing global – with Shopify empowering them to deliver on that mission.
It was never about one feature. It was always about the ecosystem with Shopify. We believe it’s going to stay at the forefront of ecommerce and we want to be there with them – pushing boundaries and making our customers’ lives easier.
