Pet care supplier booms despite supply chain disruptions

One of the industries that saw exceptional growth during the pandemic was the pet care industry, despite disruptions to supply chains globally. 

Digital Nation spoke to Steve Perissinotto, director at online animal health retailer VetShop Group to understand how supply chain disruption impacted his business.

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According to Perissinotto, VetShop's supply chain was largely unaffected, until the disruptions caused by state-wide lockdowns started to catch up with the business in the last few months.

"We didn't really have any challenges getting stock into our warehouse. That's changed in the last few months particularly around out of stocks from the manufacturers."

Perissinotto says that while there is a lot of stock on hand, they are seeing the impact of factories struggling to cope with high demand.

“We would have thought that the manufacturing world would have settled down to a routine but not the case at all,” he says.

“We're seeing enormous delays getting the products from our warehouse into the hands of the pet owner.”

Regarding visibility over the supply chain, and catching potential issues, Perissinotto says there is one story for suppliers and another one entirely for customers.

When it comes to B2B, channels of communication are open and smooth between the business and suppliers, he says. But when it come's to B2C, the picture is not so rosy.

“In terms of visibility from us to the customer, absolutely dreadful. There's a real disconnect between the communication we get from some CEO going to issue a press release telling everyone that they've got the global interests of their customers at heart..."

"You also have a contact centre that when a customer contacts them, or we contact them, they say, look, you know, we're really sorry, it's in a DC in Sydney, and it's going to be there, possibly for the rest of your life. So yeah, absolutely atrocious."

While digital purchasing systems are designed to address stocktake issues and simplify ordering, Perissinotto says that they still have to rely on people to make the final call, as the systems are unreliable.

"If we go into place an order, and we want to order 1000 widgets. And the systems tells us that there's 1100 in the warehouse, that doesn't tell us what to do next week, or it doesn't tell us whether we should order 2000 or 1100."

Despite the global disruption, Perissinotto says that VetShop has seen phenomenal growth, to the point that they’ve had to consider their ability to deliver on customer demand.

“We've had to limit that growth… We're [a] privately owned company, we're a little bit old fashioned in the sense that we say we don't want to disappoint people,” he says.

“There would have absolutely been more opportunity for that growth to be even greater, but at the end of the day, if a pet owner doesn’t get her products in reasonable condition, in a reasonable time, at a reasonable price, she’s going to be unhappy forever.”