Community Highlights: Meet Joe Huff of LSTN

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Huff.

Hi Joe, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My parents moved my family out to California from Chicago when I was six. I grew up lower middle class in a suburb of LA called Walnut but decided to move away from all of my friends thereafter barely finishing high school due to a lot of poor choices and bad influences. I moved to Newport Beach and lived there for six years and while I was there, my entrepreneurial nature was further inspired by watching many friends and acquaintances start companies and grow them into successful businesses that afforded great quality of life. However, most of those companies were in the action sports space and I decided that was not what I wanted to do so I moved away from all of my friends (again) and moved to Los Angeles. Having no seed money or network that could help, I worked several jobs at a time to get by while I struggled to find a way to get something started.

Eventually, after about six years of struggling in LA, one of my closest friends from high school called me and asked me to help him come run the small business he had just started. He had a one year old daughter and he had suddenly and unexpectedly had a stroke at the age of 30. I dropped everything and went to go run his small business while he recovered. After he recovered and I had worked for him for about six months, we realized we should try and do something together so we brainstormed until we came up with starting a small men’s fashion brand that was mostly graphic tees. In the first months, it actually did well enough that we justified getting a small warehouse that was about 1000 sq feet with the intention of building a skateboard ramp inside it so we could skate while we worked. Before we could build the skateboard ramp, one of my friends who had started a shoe company called and asked if I would help him store and ship his shoes out of our warehouse as a favor until we built the ramp. I said of course.

A few days later, another friend called and said he heard we were doing logistics and fulfillment and asked if we could do it for his brand as well. I said of course. Long story short, ten years later we no longer had an apparel company but we did have a logistics company with 100+ employees and 50,000 square feet of warehouse shipping products for 30+ major brands. At that time, my father passed away from cancer. Before he passed, I thought a lot about what he was thinking insofar as what his life meant to him. I took a long look at my life and what I was doing and what I thought I would care about if I was dying. I decided to sell my company and start something that mattered. Inspired by other social brands at the time, I launched a few different efforts to help create positive change in the world. I helped build schools in Guatemala, helped provide clean water in Haiti, helped provide shelter for victims of trafficking in Indonesia, and helped plant trees in Central America, and helped fund cancer research, all through the sales of apparel. After a few years of that, I decided I wanted to try and focus on just one cause so I partnered with my co-founder to create LSTN sound co, a premium audio company that uses proceeds from sales to help provide hearing aids to those in need. Eight years later, we have traveled to 19 cities in 10 countries to help give over 30,000 people hearing aids.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Hahahaha!!!! Definitely not a smooth road. But it’s been very fun and rewarding. We’ve been through everything from running out of money to massive production problems to travel issues and the list keeps on growing and growing. It’s a struggle but the life experiences make it all worth it as we’ll always get to keep the stories, no matter what the end result is of the business or businesses are. One example I can share is when one of the major electronic hardware companies in the world told us they were going to make us the face of their next $30million ad campaign and were going to sponsor our next hearing mission in South America. They stressed that we needed to have enough inventory for the site traffic so we bought a million dollars more in inventory than we needed. We scheduled the mission, they hired a commercial agency, we got all our travel plans sorted out, vaccines, etc…..and then they literally ghosted us for three months. Then they told us they had to push it back. Then they told us that again four months later before eventually just never following up. We were stuck with far more inventory we needed and no plan for how to sell it and a huge amount of debt – but we figured it all out eventually!

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
LSTN is a premium audio company. We make beautiful, unique audio products and we use a portion of our proceeds to help provide hearing aids to those in need through our partnership with Starkey Hearing Foundation.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
Honestly, I feel blessed because my wife and I just had our son in October 2019 so we’ve been able to spend so much time with him working from home this entire year. The importance of keeping in touch with family and friends is of course very important but really just making sure to appreciate what we all have is the key.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.lstnsound.co
• Instagram: @lstnsound
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LSTNheadphones/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9LuAqOzDxo2YRyOUaZzyPg