Fetching new customers: a full-stack pet retail launch with built-in growth loops
PetQuest is a Canadian pet supplies retailer launching online into one of the most variant-heavy categories in commerce, with multiple species, sizes, life stages, dietary needs, and SKU dimensions per product. AtlanticWorks built the brand a complete Shopify storefront from scratch, with a variant architecture that scales, shipping automation that handles real-world complexity, and performance marketing wired in to drive customer acquisition from launch.
Pet retail looks simple from the outside and is anything but underneath. A single dog food product line might span four life stages, three breed sizes, two formulations, and five bag sizes, which is 120 SKUs from one "product" before you have added a flavor variant. Multiply that across the catalog and the variant architecture becomes the make-or-break design decision: get it right and the site is intuitive to shop and easy to merchandise; get it wrong and customers bounce because they cannot find the size they need.
PetQuest also needed to launch with paid acquisition switched on, because a pet retailer competing with chain stores cannot afford to wait three months for organic to mature.
We built PetQuest as a launch-ready storefront with the variant model, shipping logic, and acquisition channels all engineered together rather than added in sequence.
We modeled the catalog around the dimensions customers actually shop by (species, life stage, size, formulation) rather than the dimensions the supplier ships in. Variants are merchandised so customers can narrow down to their exact bag in two or three clicks, and the architecture scales as PetQuest adds new lines without forcing a rebuild.
Pet products span tiny treat bags to 30-pound food sacks, with rate breaks, dim-weight rules, and carrier-specific quirks. We built shipping logic that picks the right rate, surfaces accurate delivery promises at checkout, and routes orders to the appropriate fulfillment path, without anyone in the back office having to think about it.
We connected the Shopify catalog to Google and Meta merchant feeds with full attribute coverage (breed size, life stage, formulation) so paid campaigns could segment audiences and creative against the way customers actually search. Conversion tracking was set up before launch, not after.
Pet shoppers know what they want. We designed PDPs and collection pages around fast filtering, clear feeding-guidance copy, and reorder-friendly account flows, because in this category, repeat purchase is everything.
PetQuest launched as a complete operating business: catalog, checkout, shipping, and acquisition all working in concert from day one. The variant architecture removed a class of friction that traps a lot of multi-SKU retailers, and the connected ad infrastructure meant paid channels could carry their share of growth from launch week.
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