Clean beauty may be one of the most crowded consumer categories, but Catherine Lockhart, founder of Shelter Skin, carved out a lane by moving at a pace few modern brands choose: slow, deliberate, and fully transparent. What began as a kitchen experiment has grown into a vertically integrated beauty brand that generated more than $200,000 in its first three months.
Below, we unpack how Catherine’s trust-first ethos, her decision to manufacture every product in-house, and her resilience through unexpected setbacks shaped a business focused on longevity rather than quick wins. No matter your industry, Shelter Skin’s journey offers lessons in scaling intentionally, solving creatively, and building a community that feels like part of the process.
Scaling at the pace of production
When Shelter Skin launched, Catherine wasn’t chasing overnight virality—she was focused on what her team could actually produce. “We do not have the capacity to be an overnight success,” she says. In the earliest days, her fiancé—now Shelter’s co-founder—could make “about 50 body butters in a day” and ship only 30 to 50 packages.
That bottleneck could’ve been a limitation. Instead, it became a strategic advantage. Every launch was reverse-engineered from what the team could realistically produce and ship. “I really try to temper [our growth] as much as possible,” Catherine says. “It seems as though we’re growing exactly at the pace at which we can handle.”
The brand’s slow-growth strategy created room to learn, iterate, and prevent burnout. Shelter Skin’s growth strategy is a reminder to founders: scaling before you’re operationally ready can erode product quality—and customer trust.
Reimagining production through vertical integration
After being rejected by almost every lab she contacted, Catherine realized that if she wanted to create products using tallow and natural ingredients, she’d have to make them herself. “No one really wants to work with tallow. They especially don’t want to work with natural ingredients,” she says. The labs that were open to it required minimum orders of 10,000 units and fees of $150,000—an unsustainable price tag for a self-funded founder.
That rejection sparked Shelter Skin’s vertically integrated approach. They now formulate, infuse, blend, fill, and ship everything in-house. The team built its manufacturing line using bakery whisks, brewery tanks, and a milk pasteurizer. “We spend a lot of time Googling stuff around here,” Catherine says. Her fiancé, a former consultant and mechanical engineer, used his background to help retrofit machines for cosmetic production.
This DIY operation gave the team the agility to fix issues fast. After products began melting during summer shipping mishap, they switched out plastic gaskets for custom heat-sealed jars. “We could pivot so quickly,” she says. “We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we had manufactured with a lab.”
Founders in any sector should take note that owning your process early on can enable rapid improvement, deeper product knowledge, and better margins when cash is tight.
Turning transparency into brand equity
As a former influencer known for her clean beauty recommendations, Catherine didn’t just bring an audience to Shelter Skin—she brought a relationship based on trust. “The trust that my community has in me is like the complete foundation of our relationship,” she says.
Her approach: radical transparency. She shares ingredient sources, manufacturing methods, packaging decisions, and even financials. When searching for a warehouse to lease, she walked followers through the costs and challenges of securing commercial space, aiming to be a helpful resource to her community.
Product design is collaborative too. “Whenever we have a disagreement or don’t know which direction to go,” she says, “I’ll just put it on my Instagram Story and let them choose.” Her audience doesn’t just consume the product—they help shape it.
Shelter Skin’s transparency also shows up on product pages. “We’re telling you the region our tallow is coming from … the grade of our lanolin … what extraction method we use for essential oils,” Catherine says.
For mission-driven founders, building in public isn’t a risk—it’s a trust-builder. Especially in categories prone to greenwashing, customers respond when founders show their work.
Using problems to build muscle, not panic
Shelter Skin’s first year was filled with setbacks—failed batches, misprinted jars, legal trademark threats, raw material inconsistency, and manufacturing equipment malfunctions—but none of it stopped the team.
Two weeks before launch, Catherine discovered her formula wasn’t working in large batches. “We could not make a solid body butter in bulk,” she says. “They were liquid.” The culprit was a cooling method that worked in small batches but failed in larger ones. The team turned to tools like ChatGPT and research papers to fix it in time.
Other major challenges followed: A cease-and-desist for trademark infringement arrived just two days before final packaging was to be printed. Summer shipments leaked. Oils arrived inconsistent. Each time, they problem-solved and adapted.
“You’re just gonna get knocked down all the time,” Catherine says. “You have to be willing to get back up.”
The takeaway is clear: Problem-solving is a founder’s most valuable skill. Whether it’s a formulation glitch or a supplier mishap, the real differentiator is how fast you adapt and move forward.
Shelter Skin’s path hasn’t followed the standard startup playbook. By controlling production, pacing, growth, and keeping customers involved at every step, Catherine and her team built a brand rooted in craftsmanship and customer trust. From kitchen counter to warehouse lab, from Instagram poll to product shelf, Shelter Skin shows what’s possible when you treat every challenge as a chance to refine your business, not rush it.
To learn more about how Shelter Skin is navigating early-stage growth, check out the full interview at Shopify Masters.
