Heyday is on a mission to reinvent the skincare industry as we know it. Here are some executives crafting and executing the brand’s ambitious vision.
Heyday, the franchise brand taking the facial out of the spa, is transforming the $7 billion skincare services industry by making professional, personalized skincare more accessible to the masses. In its first year of franchising, Heyday accomplished goals on par with a five-year franchisor. So far, in 2022, the brand has already awarded 120 units and is still targeting expansion in 54 major metropolitan areas across the nation.
Still considered an emerging skincare brand, Heyday is well on its way to reaching its ambitious goals, thanks in part to its experienced leadership team.
Here are some of the executive team members behind Heyday’s rapid growth.
Arielle Mortimer, Chief Operating Officer
Before Mortimer joined Heyday as COO late in 2021, she was a client.
“I just loved the ease, the accessibility, the price, and the actual experience itself,” Mortimer said. “It was just so easy — easy to book, easy to fit into your schedule. And then once you were there, it was very relaxing. It wasn’t a dog-and-pony show like a spa where you feel like you're there for three hours and you feel like you’re being sold on something. It's just a very pragmatic approach to skincare and something that you can put into your lifestyle on a frequent basis, and that’s what I loved about it.”
Mortimer began her career in e-commerce with companies like Groupon and Jet.com, focusing primarily on customer and supply operations, before moving on to Kindbody, a venture-backed women's health and fertility clinic changing how women interact with healthcare.
Then, a former colleague connected her to Heyday founders Adam Ross and Michael Pollack, who were looking for someone to help take the Heyday concept and set up the systems, tools, and infrastructure to bring it to scale.
“That’s my bread and butter,” Mortimer said. “That’s what I do, and it’s what I love to do. I love to build processes and build teams. And that’s what I’m so excited about for Heyday — to take us to the next level and really cement ourselves from a national footprint perspective as the leader in skincare.”
Kate Carroll, VP, Franchise Operations
Carroll is among the newest members of Heyday’s leadership team, having just joined the brand in April. Previously, she had spent most of her career in operations, first at Dunkin’ Brands, where she spent nearly 30 years, then with MOVATI Athletic, a network of health and fitness clubs in Canada where she most recently served as chief operating officer.
At Dunkin’, Carroll worked on the brand’s unit economic model and drafted operations playbooks for the company to help standardize and develop the Dunkin’ way of doing business. According to Carroll, continuity across locations is key for a brand that is moving from company-owned locations to franchises, so the brand must be clear about its collective goals, standards and guidelines. Carroll led that charge for Dunkin’, helping scale franchise growth for the iconic franchise.
Meanwhile, her experience at MOVATI also helped uniquely position her for success at Heyday, as it was also membership-based, and she worked extensively with pre-sale strategies to build a membership base for new locations before they opened — a strategy Heyday utilizes for each of its new franchise locations.
What brought Carroll to Heyday can be summed up in one word.
Opportunity.
“I feel like Heyday is the best-kept secret in skincare,” Carroll said. “There's nothing really like it out there. And the opportunity to come here and build a growth engine to support franchisees and help them build their businesses — and build the Heyday brand and cement it across the U.S. — it’s just a phenomenal opportunity.”
Rachel Lubin, VP, Finance & Strategy
Rachel Lubin comes from a startup background. She started at Living Social, eventually rising to director of revenue optimization. She was then an early employee at Framebridge, an online custom framing company, before co-founding her own company in 2019, The Lane — a social club determined to prove that family time can actually be fun.
But it was her previous background in hospitality that made the Heyday experience stand out to her.
“I was immediately enamored with the brand and really excited about it,” she said. “The way we're approaching skincare is so different than what you’d typically see in the wellness world before, and it’s meant to be this sort of empowering concept of really living your best life. And there was something just really pure and delightful about that.”
“We’re really coming at skincare from a hospitality perspective and personalizing a program for the clients that come through the door, all while building a longstanding relationship with those clients,” she added. “Nobody else is doing that.”
Lubin’s responsibilities include working closely with Heyday’s learning and development teams and overseeing everything related to finance and strategy, customer experience, and merchandising and inventory.
Nandhita Kumar, Head of Product and UX
Kumar came to Heyday in February 2021, where she was the first dedicated member of the product and tech team. Previously, her career had been a mix of technology, psychology and design, much of it focused on user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) for lifestyle e-comm brands and, most recently, a cryptocurrency forum.
Her goals at Heyday, she says, include organizing client data so clients can have a true omnichannel experience and streamlining the client-skin therapist relationship.
“Our clients have these amazing conversations and experiences in the treatment room with their skin therapists,” she said. “So we want to provide clients with the same insights, recommendations, and touchpoints from their experts outside of the treatment room to create a deeper, more accessible, more meaningful experience.”
This includes one of Heyday’s biggest initiatives, the recent launch of its new iOS app — something Kumar and her team had been working on since she joined the brand.
“Heyday is really a habit-driven product, and we didn't have any direct channel of communication with our members,” said Kumar. “We have people coming in month-over-month to book facials, receive treatment and then follow up with product purchases. We wanted to enhance this experience for our members, and this app allows us to give people access to their information and integrate Heyday seamlessly into their lives.”
As Heyday continues to grow, Kumar and her team will be behind the scenes, continually evaluating and streamlining the client-skin therapist experience — the professional, personalized relationship that Heyday prides itself on.
John McKinney, Chief Technology Officer
McKinney joined Heyday in April 2021, and he comes from a varied background. He co-founded Ashe Avenue Development in 2007 — a technology shop that built web platforms, native apps, and experiential campaigns. Through Ashe, McKinney worked with various startups, agencies, and media companies. He helped build the original Vice.com and worked with AOL, which at the time was working with a number of independent media brands.
AOL acquired Ashe in 2015, and McKinney left AOL in 2017 to get back to the startup world, working in fintech as a VP of engineering and a CTO. He also worked as a consultant, which is how he met Ross and Pollack, who explained what they were trying to build with Heyday.
“I loved their vision,” McKinney said. “It was so laser-focused and awesome. They had such a clear mission of improving people's lives and bringing skincare and self-care to everyone, and that meant that I could be in charge of building the tools we give to people to empower their skincare journey. Applying my technical mindset with the clarity of their overall vision was perfect harmony."
McKinney, like Kumar, works primarily with data and in helping streamline the omnichannel experience for Heyday clients. He helps build data systems that allow the brand to effectively report on true customer behaviors, then stitches that data together to provide the best possible customer experience. The app has been a big part of this process, as has the launch of an improved website.
McKinney’s next project, he says, is to build a suite of custom tools that Heyday skin therapists can use in-shop with clients so that everything — progress, preferences, personalized recommendations — is documented, so even if a client travels to another state and visits a Heyday location, all their information will be readily available.
It’s building these types of systems that streamline the client experience that McKinney says he enjoys most.
“Being able to build the systems that empower that skincare journey — that’s truly what excites me,” McKinney said. “I am more of a backend data engineer by trade, so really seeing how all these things fit together and knowing the level of value we can deliver to our customers in their actual experience is really exciting to me. That’s the bullseye we’ve been targeting for about a year, and we are starting to hit it. So seeing all these things come to life is really exciting.”
Heyday’s startup costs range between $768,300 to $1,012,300, depending on which market the store is located. Other factors like design, configuration and labor costs will also impact the total investment. Click here to see the full cost breakdown.
