Case Study
How VitaPets Reduced Fulfilment to 1.19 Days Across Asia With a 4PL
Founder-led pet brands making products in the UK or Europe and selling to pet owners in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, who are tired of being the person at the packing table.
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Some family members have paws, and Dylan Cheung, founder of VitaPets, considers his Bernese mountain dog as a child. Like any dog parent, he wants his furry kid to live the longest, happiest life possible, which led him to sell veterinarian-developed pet supplements.
Cheung lives in London but grew up mostly in Hong Kong, so he knows both worlds. In the UK, he saw how much care (and how many supplements) pets get. In Asia, people already treat their dogs and cats as family, and pet ownership keeps climbing, but he wished pet care in parts of the region matched what he saw in the UK.
That gap is the market VitaPets sells into today: Supplements made in the UK and sold to pet owners in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Pet owners liked what they found, but getting the supplements to them was the hard part.
The Problem
Pet Parents Were Interested in VitaPets, but Deliveries Took a Week or More
Parcels took the long walk home.
Shipping direct from the UK was a nightmare, with long transit times, delays, and parcels that didn't always reach their owners. For a supplement people buy on repeat, a late parcel is a broken routine. Dogs are famously bad at waiting, and so are their owners.
Still waiting at the door.
Moving stock to a warehouse in China helped. It still meant that deliveries took roughly a week, at best, between an order and a Hong Kong doorstep. Not terrible, but not what the founder wanted for his customers.
Pack leader, in every sense.
Every order was packed by hand, by the founder. Every hour at the packing table was an hour he could have spent on marketing, product, or with the pup who started it all.
Growth pulling at the leash.
More orders meant more boxes, more delays, and more hours doing everything alone. The brand was growing. The packing table was not.
The Solution
Fulfillment, Taken Care Of.
Wayfindr set VitaPets up with a Hong Kong warehouse and a connected system, then took the packing tape out of the founder's hands.
Stock close to the doorstep.
Moving inventory to a warehouse in Hong Kong put VitaPets a day or two from its customers instead of a week. This has become a logistical advantage.
Trained to run itself.
VitaPets' store connects to Wayfindr's logistics platform, Bundle, so orders and inventory update on their own. No spreadsheets, no manual shuffling and no founder with packaging supplies.
Logistics built for the zoomies
With Wayfindr handling the logistics, orders grew 2.5x within a few months. It’s the sort of surge where cracks usually appear. Fulfilment speed held anyway, and some Hong Kong customers started getting their orders the same day they placed them, which is faster than most dogs learn to sit.
The Outcome
VitaPets' customers now get their orders in a day or two.
Here is what that looks like.
Fetched, packed, and delivered in 1.19 days.
Orders are picked, packed, and on their way in just over a day due to the warehouse being closer to customers.
Close to 100% of parcels come home.
Parcels arrive, and they arrive when they should. Customers are amazed at how fast the shipping is, which is the kind of feedback all brands want to hear.
A pack 2.5x bigger, still on schedule.
Growth tends to expose cracks. VitaPets' customers still saw fast, reliable delivery as order volume grew.
Back to leading the pack.
With fulfilment solved, the founder spends his time on marketing and product, and on doubling down on what makes VitaPets work. Next up: more products and more markets (and, with luck, more walks).
From messages to wagging tails
VitaPets has a direct Slack channel to the people running its stock. Warehouse, inventory, and logistics problems the founder hadn't even thought of get picked up and dealt with, and on the rare occasion that something does go wrong, fixing it is treated as a top priority. For a founder who used to handle every box himself, that is the difference between running a brand and running a packing table.
In Their Words
When it comes to customers, they are amazed how fast the shipping is. Average shipping time is one to two days, and you don’t see a lot of e-commerce companies in Hong Kong or in Asia that have that sort of fast shipping. As the founder, I think you should focus on what really matters, pushing the needle forward, which is really marketing and sales. There are people who do logistics way better than you. You guys do it better. Why would I take up the logistics? That’s not my strength. With a reliable partner like you guys, the fulfillment side is solved, which makes my life a lot easier.
Talk to us about pet product fulfilment for your brand.
Your customers treat their pets like family, so a parcel that takes a week to arrive doesn't sit well. Their pup is going to chew some slippers while they wait.
We run fulfilment for pet brands, so supplements, treats, and accessories reach the doorstep fast, and you get back to growing the brand.
Wayfindr Insights
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