Haven Tents is a camping and overland brand founded in Sandy, Utah, in 2019.
Weeks after Haven Tents launched its first Kickstarter, Derek Tillotson started finding his own photos in scam ads. The sites took orders for his lay-flat hammock tent at a fraction of the price, then shipped a cheap regular hammock. In the first year he personally reported and shut down more than 200 of them. The Sandy company's real campaign, in September 2019, had found 300 customers.
The idea came in the summer of 2018, when Tillotson was lying in an ordinary hammock and wondered what would happen if his head and feet sat lower. A year earlier he and his wife had sold their house to travel with three young children, and they visited 38 countries in 54 weeks. He had no product design experience and nearly quit at the sketch. The prototype worked.
When the first pallets arrived at the warehouse, he panicked that they would never sell that many tents. Then the pandemic sent people outside. The tents arrive by the pallet, and Haven designs them and runs the business from Sandy. The 2025 ultralight Spectre raised $566,889 from 1,298 backers, which is a lot of people who also wanted their feet lower.
In testing, Haven loaded a Spectre hammock with 2,000 pounds of salt, and it never broke.
