Annie Graybill Built Havenwith for Fragrance-Free Family Travel

A beautiful vacation rental that gave the family headaches from synthetic fragrance. A hotel room nobody could relax in thanks to the cleaning products. Annie Graybill and her family love to travel, and every trip undid the work they had done at home. Finding a stay that held the line was hard, so she set out to make it easy.

Annie Graybill is the founder of Havenwith, a booking site for less-toxic, wellness-forward places to stay. She runs it from Breckenridge, Colorado, and she is a member of the Entreprenista League. Havenwith took shape in early mornings and weekends around a full-time job.

“A healthier way of living is actually better, in every sense, once you know how to build it,” Annie says.

Her path from a career in the outdoor industry to a nontoxic travel company came down to a mattress search.

The mattress search, then the layoff

Living in a ski town, Annie started in the outdoor industry. The work was fun, and something kept nagging. “I kept feeling like I wasn’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make, like I was circling something bigger without landing on it,” she says.

Then she went looking for a new mattress and found Avocado Green Mattress. “I was already on a personal mission to remove toxins from our home, and I remember thinking, this is the work,” she says. Six months later, she joined the team and spent 6 years in marketing, learning what hides in an ordinary house.

Becoming a mom through IVF sharpened all of it, making her “even more alarmingly aware of the toxins surrounding my family, and just how much they mattered.”

In 2024, Annie was laid off, and she had seen it coming. She had already started thinking about building something of her own. “By the time it happened, it felt like a door I’d been standing in front of finally opening,” she says.

She had carried ideas for years. “It had to be something I couldn’t not do,” she says. Havenwith was that idea, and the layoff removed her last excuse to put it off.

What the first launch taught her

Annie’s first launch ran on a subscription revenue model, and it did not go to plan. “People are burnt out on subscriptions in general, and for a new, niche category with no proven track record yet, asking someone to commit to a recurring cost before we’d even earned their trust was a hard sell,” she says.

The mission resonated, but it arrived in the wrong shape, at the wrong moment. “That was an early, humbling lesson,” she says. “Being right about the problem doesn’t mean you’re right about the business model.”

The standard every Havenwith home meets

Every home on Havenwith has to be free of synthetic fragrance, cleaned with approved supplies, and laundered in certified detergents. Guests filter from there for organic mattresses, nontoxic cookware, water filtration, and wellness features like saunas.

The guest she built it for has already changed how she lives at home. She reads ingredient labels and has swapped out her cleaning products and detergents. Many are managing a health condition, are pregnant or trying to conceive, or are raising young kids. “Above all, they’re someone who wants their vacation to actually restore them,” Annie says.

The accomplishment she names first is her hosts. “Anyone can build a platform,” she says. “The people who’ve joined us actually feel like partners. I know their stories, I know their why.”

First guest stays and the reviews that came back

This past year, guests stayed in Haven with homes for the first time, and the reviews came back overwhelmingly positive. Guests described the difference the fragrance-free standard made in how they slept and how they felt on the trip.

“There’s a difference between believing in an idea and watching real people live it out,” Annie says. “That’s the win I’m most excited to celebrate.”

Where Havenwith goes next

Education is the piece Annie is most excited about. She wants Havenwith to be a place people come to learn why any of this matters, so that a guest who learns something during a stay goes home and changes something in her own house.

The rest is growth with intention: more homes, more options for families in more places. She wants guests to take trips they had given up on, some for the first time in years. The future she describes is “a world where no one has to choose between seeing the places they love and feeling good while they do it.”

You can follow Annie on LinkedIn, browse the homes at havenwith.com, and find her community on Instagram, which is where most of her hosts found her.

Annie’s launch story is a reminder that being right about the problem is only half the work. The Entreprenista League surrounds you with women founders who have rebuilt their own models in public and will tell you what they learned doing it. Learn more about the Entreprenista League right here.