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Finding a partner, not just a fulfillment service
Learn how healthy dog treat brand NutriPaw found the true partnership they wanted in ShipBob.
“Fulfillment is one of the areas that we were super keen to outsource to a partner who’s been doing it for a while and knows how it’s done. We can trust ShipBob to support and handle fulfillment for us, so that we can focus on the strategic side of our business, helping us grow and develop much faster.”
– Adelina Zotta, Co-Founder of NutriPaw
Customer Profile
NutriPaw is on a mission to change the lives of 1 million pets by 2025 through offering natural, tasty remedies to everyday issues. Founded in late 2020, the London-based company creates dog treats that are specially designed to address common canine conditions, including stress, allergies, and hip and joint issues. Each of their 4 product varieties are made from all-natural, high-quality ingredients, and are designed to help your pets to live healthier, happier lives.
Key metrics
- 4 SKUs
- 8,000 units sent to ShipBob in February 2022 alone
- 12 3PLs considered
- Grew to over 125,000 customers in 2022
- Winners of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe – Retail & Ecommerce in 2023
About NutriPaw
While COVID might have kept us from our loved ones, it only brought us closer to our pets.
As global quarantines forced humanity to turn inward in search of companionship, millions of new pets were adopted and the pet supplies industry experienced an unprecedented boom in growth.
Londoners Adelina Zotta and Connor Westby noticed the surge, and knew it was an opportunity they couldn’t miss.
The two had wanted to start an ecommerce business together for some time, but were passionate about building a brand that positively impacted both humans and animals, rather than becoming just another pet supplies vendor.
With the market widening and humans and animals alike in need of help, the timing was perfect.
Together, Connor and Adelina founded NutriPaw: a brand specifically designed to naturally address common canine health issues through delicious herbal dog treats.
After introducing their first product designed to calm anxious dogs, they quickly released other treat varieties, including allergy-fighting, hip and joint wellness, and multi-action. Since then, NutriPaw has grown to the point where it’s just not practical to handle fulfillment on their own .
We sat down with Adelina Zotta and Connor Westby to discuss outgrowing self-fulfillment, must-haves in a 3PL partnership, and getting started with ShipBob’s Manchester, UK fulfillment center.
Outgrowing self-fulfillment
As told to ShipBob by Adelina Zotta and Connor Westby, co-founders of NutriPaw.
Since self fulfilling orders from our launch over a year ago, we reached a point where it became completely unsustainable for us to continue doing so.
Our order volume has grown immensely since we started the business, to where fulfillment doesn’t leave time for us doing anything else.
At the scale we’re starting to operate at, keeping everything in-house would mean that we would be picking and packing orders all day!
We have even bigger ambitions for our business going forward, including launching new products and increasing stock. So we wanted to free up our time to focus on growing our business, and knew it was time to outsource fulfillment to experts.
“It was incredibly important to us to find a 3PL with which we could form a true partnership — not just another traditional vendor-client relationship. We wanted a partner that really understood what was important to us as a business, and that would be willing to go the extra mile to meet our needs.”
– Adelina Zotta, Co-Founder of NutriPaw
Finding a partner, not just a fulfillment service
I spoke to 12 different fulfillment companies of all shapes and sizes — but our conversation with our ShipBob representative was by far the best.
Out of everyone that we had spoken to, our conversations with him felt the most like a real partnership.
He was extremely responsive, made sure to close the loop with us on all the questions we had, and guided us through optimal packaging decisions.
He even helped coordinate the move of our products from London to ShipBob’s Manchester fulfillment center!
Altogether, ShipBob was able to provide us with the bespoke solution that we were looking for, and a sense of partnership we just couldn’t find anywhere else.
“One of our must-haves for a fulfillment solution was partnership. We wanted to partner with a 3PL that would be kind of like us: positive, relaxed, but also reliable. We really wanted a provider with whom we could form a relationship, where it wouldn’t just be based on numbers — and we found that with ShipBob.”
Adelina Zotta, Co-Founder of NutriPaw
Trusting in a track record of excellence
The UK is our home base, and all the customers we ship to are in the UK. We spoke to some classical, British-owned fulfillment companies in our search, but ShipBob turned out to be perfect for us.
We had no concerns about ShipBob’s HQ being in the US — if anything, it was more of a positive!
ShipBob has done incredibly well in the US, and their track record reassured us that we can grow together with ShipBob as it ramps up its international operations.
“ShipBob absolutely smashed it in the US! Because ShipBob has done very well in the US, we’re confident that it will do great over here with us as well.”
– Adelina Zotta & Connor Westby, Co-Founders of NutriPaw
As we got ready to launch with ShipBob, our implementation specialist made the onboarding process very simple and understandable.
It’s been super easy to log in to our dashboard and check on orders, too — there’s clearly been a lot of development that’s gone into making it such a smooth transition process.
Getting stock to the Manchester fulfillment center has been smooth as well, thanks to ShipBob’s flexible receiving process and warehouse receiving orders, or WROs.
We don’t always know exactly when our inventory shipments will arrive from our suppliers, and other 3PLs told us they would reject our shipments if they didn’t arrive on a certain time and date.
ShipBob is a lot more flexible because of their technology, and our representative helped explain how receiving works, which was a big plus.
What’s next for NutriPaw?
With fulfillment and shipping outsourced to ShipBob, we can finally focus on expanding our product offering to better capture our customer needs.
In the next few months we’ll be looking to release at least 2-4 new products, developing products around skin, nail, and coat health, as well as gut health (including digestion, probiotics, and prebiotics).
We’re currently doing some research into formulas with some UK vets and will hopefully get those to market in the first half of this year.
We’ll also eventually look to add non-treat SKUs to our repertoire (like nose and paw balms and shampoos) — and then, of course, we’d love to design another product line for cats!
The opportunity is really endless — and with ShipBob as our trusted partner, we’ll be able to keep helping the tons of dogs in the UK, and even eventually pets all over the world!
NutriPaw’s team at ShipBob
Jordan Altamuro
Jordan is the Implementation Consultant who onboarded NutriPaw to ShipBob.
Carlos Cardo Alcalde
Carlos is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports NutriPaw.
Get in touch with ShipBob
Fill out the form below to learn how ShipBob’s ecommerce fulfillment services and technology can help your business, discover if we’re a mutual fit, and get a pricing quote.
