The heart of HAE: from South Africa to the world.

HAE was founded in 1998 in South Africa by my eldest sister, Hanneli Blaauw. While working as an ER nurse, she collaborated with a doctor in Germany who taught her how to cultivate the specific botanicals and shared the formula for the cream. She began making it for her patients — people who came in with serious burns and stubborn skin conditions — and watched something extraordinary happen. The wounds healed.

Word spread, the way it does when something actually works. Hanneli kept making it, kept sharing it, kept seeing results the pharmacy shelves couldn’t match. Eventually she passed the formula down to my sister Amia and me.

My own connection to the cream deepened the day my eldest son suffered third-degree burns in a house fire. He spent two weeks in the ER. When we finally brought him home, we started using HAE on his wounds. The results were astonishing.

I moved to America in 2001 and kept making the cream. I shared it with people I met — people fighting eczema, sunburn, dry skin, surgical scars, radiation burns from cancer treatment, the kind of things that don’t heal easily with what you can buy at a drugstore. The stories that came back kept surprising me.

After Hanneli passed in 2006, I felt called to bring her remedy to more people. I designed a label with her face on it and gave the cream a name that honors the three of us: Hanneli, Amia, Esme. HAE.