We were lucky to catch up with Emily Ahsan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Emily, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
Our mission with Love Huvet is to improve the field of veterinary medicine through humor, using our voice, and building a community of like minded and passionate veterinary professionals who are ready to be the change they want to see in vet med. This field desperately needs to make changes to make vet med a better place to work, and Love Huvet is here to inspire that change while supporting the humans of vet med.
Love Huvet stands for the “love for the humans of vet med”, and that’s exactly how we hope our products and brand makes our customers feel: loved and appreciated. I know what it’s like to be on that roller coaster of working, burning out, starting at a new clinic, and repeat — it makes an already difficult profession so much harder. Being able to brighten the day of a hard working veterinary professional means everything to us at Love Huvet.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hi, I’m Emily Ahsan, I’m the Founder of Love Huvet and a Certified Veterinary Technician. I’m originally from New York but I now live in Florida with my husband, our son, and our two dogs, Walter (mini schnauzer) and Ruth (schnauzer mix).
I grew up surrounded by animals and always kinda knew in the back of my head that I would pursue a career in veterinary medicine. Growing up, I loved horses, and I was a competitive rider until 2019. My professional path in veterinary medicine started with a job as a veterinary assistant, and that lasted about six months / helped me get my foot in the door. I like to say that that job taught me what NOT to do, and I was very excited to move on to a new clinic. The next clinic I worked at was referred by a family friend. It was a part of a small chain of veterinary hospitals, and that comes with its own pros and cons. I was lucky to work with a great group of people but unfortunately, the management was terrible. After about a year, I was ready to move on again, but this time I landed a job at my dream clinic. The clinic was very small but extremely business oriented and — best of all — there was an open line of communication with staff and management. Working here, I learned so much about (and fell in love with) the business side of a veterinary clinic — from business management to accounting to marketing. Not many people know this but I almost pursued a degree in business before ultimately letting my love + passion for animals win and pull me into vet med. It’s funny how things have come full circle now.
But sadly my dream clinic turned into a nightmare. I learned so much at that clinic and it really ignited my passion for making veterinary medicine a better place to work, but two years into my employment, the small but mighty clinic merged with an emergency / specialty animal hospital and the shift for our team of three was huge. The biggest change and challenge: toxicity within the clinic. Many of the emergency / specialty hospital veterinary staff felt worn down from empty promises, were dealing with burnt out, or had extreme compassion fatigue after years of working for low pay, experiencing high turnover at their clinic, dealing with aggressive clients, etc. And unfortunately this is common in vet med.
If you’re not a veterinary professional, this may surprise you but there’s a mental health crisis in our field. Some of the causes are systemic — issues like unfair wages, for example — but working in vet med isn’t all “puppies and kittens” like some people may think (we wish!). Veterinary professionals are there for your pets during their most difficult times — and it’s not easy on us either. I can’t tell you how many cases have affected me emotionally (and mentally), and that’s true for every veterinary professional. Burnout and compassion fatigue are common in veterinary medicine — especially when coupled with the fact that many of us work long hours at understaffed clinics and hospitals. When you look up the statistics around veterinary medicine and suicide, it’s frightening. We have to do better for the people of veterinary medicine.
I spent a year working in this new merge situation, and I tried to make a difference in the culture of the hospital overall. A co-worker and I started a culture committee but not much came from it. It’s hard to make a change from within when you don’t have people (especially the higher-ups) onboard and caring. And then I started to notice the toxic energy getting to me. So I saved up some money and decided I would step away from the job to focus on studying for the VTNE and regroup.
After taking and passing my exam (woo!), I contemplated not going back to veterinary medicine so many times. But one day I saw a post in a Facebook group about a clinic hiring in my town and it seemed “meant-to-be”. And it was! It was an amazing experience and the people were great. Plus, I could work there part-time which really helped me manage some of the residual burnout and compassion fatigue I was feeling from my last position. And then COVID hit. Work slowed at the clinic and I could tell my coworkers could use a pick-me-up. I’ve always loved to craft so I started working on a sticker for my co-workers and I decided to document the process and post it on TikTok. Well, that video went somewhat viral! I woke up the next morning with so many comments and messages from other veterinary professionals asking how they could get their hands on one — and I immediately started working on more designs!
When I started this business in 2020, Love Huvet was called Vet Stickers, since that was our primary focus. But it wasn’t long before our products expanded into other categories like apparel and stationary. One of our best-selling products is our Vet Med Wellness Journal, a journal designed specifically for veterinary professionals with prompts to help you reflect, vent, and unwind after a day at the clinic. And that journal is actually getting revamped and will be released with a brand new cover + pages in May! We can’t wait.
Love Huvet is approaching our third year in business and our catalog is more expansive than ever — we recently released brand new products like croc charms and iced coffee koozies — and we have so much more planned for this year. But we’re not just products. We also host monthly online events (we call them Wellness Workshops) that are free to veterinary professionals. These workshops feature either a special guest or an interactive crafting activity, and offer a chance for veterinary professionals to connect with others in the community, learn about a variety of wellness related topics, and unwind. In the past we’ve had yoga workshops, embroidery sessions, goal setting workshops, and covered topics like negotiations in the workplace, relief work for veterinary professionals, and workplace culture. You can learn more at https://lovehuvet.com/
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media is how my business was born! I wasn’t intending to start a business when I posted that TikTok with the sticker I designed for my co-workers — but after waking up to over 50K views and so many comments and messages from veterinary professionals wanting to know where they could buy my sticker, I knew I had something special worth pursuing. So that’s my first piece of advice: make sure that whatever you’re selling or promoting on social media is something that your community (in my case, the veterinary community) would want in the first place.
I try to stay active on social media as much as I can but that doesn’t mean I post multiple times a day or even once a day. And this is probably my biggest advice with social media. Don’t over-do it. Yes, it’s good to be consistent but creating content is a lot of work on top of already running your business. Try to plan your content ahead of time, batch record or create when you’re feeling inspired, and repurpose your content from one platform to another. This saves me a ton of time and allows me to be more consistent without making content creation my full-time job.
My third piece of advice: don’t be afraid to pay for help! If you’re struggling in one aspect of your business, there’s someone out there that can help you. I’m not the best planner so I invested in a marketing manager that helps me plan and manage my marketing and social (she also creates posts, stories, blogs, and so many other things — this has been my best investment to date, she is amazing).
And lastly, apply trends (like trending audios, templates, or styles) to your social media content. Using trends, especially on TikTok and Instagram, can help your content reach a wider audience. But just make sure that you’re applying the trend in a way that makes sense for your audience / your business so you reach the right people that would want to know more about your business. Bonus tip: your content doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t always be about your products or what you’re selling. I’ve had a lot of success on social media by focusing on connecting with my community rather than promoting my products all of the time.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
Manufacturing seems intimidating but nowadays we have it easy! When I first started, I was creating stickers using my Cricut, but as orders continued to come in I couldn’t keep up. I also wanted higher quality stickers so I started looking into manufacturers. And by “looking into manufacturers”, I mean I went to Google and found some options. It was as simple as that.
One thing that can be intimidating about manufacturing is you aren’t sure about the quality of what you’re ordering until it arrives. I think it’s very important to do a “quality control” order when working with a new manufacturer so I always order a low quantity of product first to see what the quality is like (AKA if I like them / if my audience likes them). If they look good, I list them on my ecommerce store with a small inventory to see how they sell, and if the items sell well, I invest in a higher quantity to get a better price per unit.
But some of our manufacturing at Love Huvet is still done “in house” or rather “in my house”. I hand press most of our apparel designs, and up until our most recent restock, I sewed all of our scrub caps and hair accessories, too. I think the biggest thing with manufacturing is not letting it intimidate you — whether you’re planning to DIY or outsource, there are so many resources online that can help you, and many of them are completely free.
What is the most rewarding part of being a business owner / doing what you do?
Being able to support the humans of veterinary medicine is hands down the most rewarding part of what we do at Love Huvet. It means the world to me to know that our products make people laugh, put a smile on their face, or just make them feel seen and appreciated as a veterinary professional. Plus, we work alongside non-profits and other fundraising events that support the veterinary community. I am so grateful for our community and every single person that has ever liked one of our posts or bought from our shop — I truly believe that together we can be the change this field needs.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lovehuvet.com
- Instagram: love.huvet
- Facebook: love.huvet
- Twitter: lovehuvet
- Youtube: lovehuvet
- Other: TikTok: @love.huvet