As the sun shined brightly on the Quad one spring day in 2019, Ethan Haber (’21) couldn’t resist taking his pet hamster outside. As he watched “Mooksie” roll around in an exercise ball, he noticed a woman walking her dog near the University Bookstore. Suddenly, he had an idea: What if you could walk a hamster?
Haber, a studio art major and entrepreneurship minor, brought the idea to the Center for Entrepreneurship’s Startup Lab, an on-campus program providing mentoring and initial funding to launch ideas with potential. In fall 2019, he set up a limited liability company, or LLC, upon their advice and figured out how to create a ring-shaped carrier that securely holds a small pet’s exercise ball. That way, the owner and pet can walk at the same time. He named the business Happy Habitats, and retailers including Amazon, Chewy and Petco carry his products.
His product has been so popular that he even had a customer who got the Happy Habitats logo tattooed on his neck. The pet owner saw Haber’s booth at a trade show in Orlando. “I off-handedly said, ‘If you show up with the logo tattooed tomorrow, I’ll give you our products for free,’” Haber recalls. “The next day this guy came back with the tattoo on his neck and a cart for his stuff. I was flabbergasted.”
Haber contends that his exercise ball — a transparent sphere that contains small pets like hamsters, mice and gerbils — can be a safer way to let your pet roam than letting them run loose. “I had to fish my hamster out from under the mini fridge once or twice,” he says. “That was a little scary, so I wanted to create something safer than that.”
Mooksie, the hamster who inspired the brand, made many Wake Forest memories of his own, including meeting the Demon Deacon and attending a printmaking class. Haber loved his hamster so much that at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Haber drove from Michigan back to North Carolina to retrieve the pet from his dorm room. Mooksie died during Haber’s junior year.
As long as Haber can remember, he has loved caring for animals for “the unconditional love that they give you,” he says. “The bond you can build with a pet is pretty special.” He currently lives with a Shih Tzu-Havanese named Casey that Haber got when he was 13 years old and a new hamster named Princess Lady. “She’s tied right up there for a favorite hamster with the OG, Mooksie,” he says.
Even as a kid, Haber dreamt of having his own stuffed-animal company, and he has designed and hand-sewn plush toys for years. “So when I had the idea for a pet product,” he says, “it was kind of a perfect marriage of wanting to have my own business and loving animals.”
The Startup Lab
Greg Pool (JD/MBA ’08), associate professor of the practice in the Center for Entrepreneurship, remembers picking Haber to join the small Startup Lab cohort from more than 80 student applicants. “One of the things we’re really interested in is the person,” Pool says. “We want them to be coachable, and we want them to be somebody that has that passion and ability to actually see the thing through, and he certainly did.”
Haber worked on his project with professors and classmates. His art experience helped “with creating a prototype to get something out of my mind and physically into the world,” he says.
Vera Mudry (’20) and Haber were paired as accountability partners in the Startup Lab during the fall 2019 semester, working together each week to check off their goals. (Mudry, who now works as an assistant manager of product development at Tarte Cosmetics in New York, was working on an idea involving fashion tape.) “Ethan’s inspirational in that (he) was always all-in, from the beginning. You could tell it wasn’t just a class for him or just an idea. It was his future, what he really wanted to work on, what he wanted to create,” Mudry says.
During the Startup Lab, he began working with P9, an Edgewater, New Jersey-based design agency, to test the product, source materials and make prototypes in China. He continues to consult with P9 on product ideas.
Haber’s entrepreneurial resilience was put to the test during COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020. Not only were his college classes remote, but global port delays stalled his business. En route from China, the first set of exercise ball molds sat on a ship in Long Beach, California, for about a year before getting to Haber. Finally, in March 2021, two months before he graduated, Haber debuted an early version of the walkable ball at a pet products show in Orlando. Happy Habitats began selling products in October 2022.
A new product
Today, Haber lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and runs the startup, handling day-to-day operations, marketing and sales, he says. His father, Adam Haber, is his partner and adviser.
Last year, Ethan Haber won patents for Happy Habitats’ two main products: the Roam transparent exercise ball and its portable carrier, called the Halo. “If our product takes significant hold in the market, … no one else can make it but us,” he says.
He contends that the Roam is safer than most balls used to exercise pets because it has smaller ventilation holes to keep paws from getting stuck. “It is like we added seat belts to the car,” he says. The product also has a two-step locking mechanism to make sure the door doesn’t come open.
Rolling into the future
In his experience as an entrepreneur, Haber has learned what may be the most important lesson: “Your highs are high and your lows are low. But if you have the stomach for that kind of thing, then entrepreneurship is the right path for you.”
He acknowledges how tough it can get. “I’ve had days where I don’t want to get out of bed,” he says. “But then … I had a meeting with a big box retailer at their headquarters last week. I flew out for it, and the meeting went very well — I was on top of the world.”
He remembers learning at Wake Forest that it usually takes years for a startup to become profitable, and this year will mark four years since Happy Habitats began selling products. So in 2026, Haber’s goal is to turn his first profit.
He has often prioritized his startup over other ways he could spend his time. To make ends meet, he hosts trivia nights at local bars. Back when he got involved with his startup as a student, he recalls, “There were definitely moments where I chose to work hard instead of go out and have fun. … I had one friend specifically say to me, ‘Remember when you used to be cool and do this with us?’”
But each success — whether it’s winning a long-awaited patent or successfully breaking into online markets — reminds him to keep pursuing his goal: making pets, and pet owners, happier.
