The UK’s first-ever pet food-as-a-service specialist, PetShop.co.uk, has enjoyed phenomenal growth by running its business on NetSuite’s ERP platform.
The pet supply firm, which offers pet food as a subscription-based service dubbed Bottomless Bowl, has grown by 50 percent year-on-year and now stocks more than half a million pounds’ worth of stock spanning in excess of 10,000 products.
That’s a fantastic cloud success story when you consider that the business was born off the back of a £5,000 Prince's Trust loan by former City worker Adam Taylor and his now-wife Lexi, out of the annoyance of running out of pet food and the inconvenience of how heavy it could be to transport.
The firm was using multiple different systems in its early days, which it found frustrating and added additional and unnecessary complexity. That’s what led to evaluating NetSuite, according to Taylor.
“We are using NetSuite for ERP, accounting, warehouse management and our pick, pack, and despatch management and we chose Bronto for email marketing because it was owned by NetSuite. Because it’s all under one umbrella, ultimately, nothing is impossible in terms of what we have tried to do,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.
“We’ve been able to grow 50% year-on-year for the last few years. It would have been very difficult to achieve that growth without NetSuite.”
While PetShop.co.uk has enjoyed immense growth thus far, it now wants to scale even further and will be using NetSuite’s many capabilities to support expansion plans.
It’s also building KPIs to help more effectively monitor the health of the business, according to Taylor.
“Our business model is already good, but I like the peace of mind of knowing how healthy it is. Alternatively, it gives us the ability to find if we have lots of leaking holes that we need to fix,” he said.
“We are building all this stuff in NetSuite now so when we grow it will grow with us. The transparency you get using cloud data means you can see instantly how the business is operating. You can then use that information to steer your business decisions and you can be a lot more bullish.
“Having a business that is entrepreneur-owned has been key to our success. It’s forced us to look at whether we have a profitable model and where we can outthink our competitors and are able to pass on savings to customers,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.
Despite the business’ rapid rise to success, fuelled by technology, Taylor still recognises the importance of the human touch.
“I still write all the emails we send to our customers. We haven’t outsourced that,” he said. “It’s very key for any company to maintain that direct communication with the customer.”
