Business

A one on one with the Co-Founder of Supertails, Varun Sadana

Supertails.com is a first-of-its-kind platform that serves the growing pet parent community by offering dependable veterinary care and a one-stop-shop for pet food and supplies.

Varun Sadana is a Co-Founder at Supertails.com, a first-of-its-kind platform and a one-stop solution for pet food and supplies to the growing pet parent community.

What is unique about your business?
Supertails is the first-of-its-kind platform that supports the pet parent community by providing a one-stop solution for their petcare needs. We connect pet parents with the right expertise, be it to discover products their pet may like, to find doctors, trainers, or online advice. This ecosystem of support differentiates us from other brands in this category.

Supertails empowers pet parents in 3 ways:

  • With the largest assortment of pet supplies, over 150+ brands.
  • With our cohesive community of vets, behavioural experts, pet buddies and pet lovers
  • With content led thought leadership through our online channels

Supertails Evolution in the past few years.
We launched in July 2021 and in the last 10 months, Supertails has grown considerably. We began with our platform supertails.com, which has now become the only pet supplies platform in the country to list over 150 pet care brands. We have so far served over 18000 pet parents across 3067 pin codes.

Besides our pet supplies platform, we have services like online vet consultation and online dog training, which are currently running on an NPS of 4.8.

We also have an Instagram community, where we share daily pet care advice. This community has now grown to almost 18k people.

How did you raise funding?
We were fortunate enough to raise funds before we’d even laid out the exact idea of Supertails, I think our idea and collective experience worked in our favour. Vineet, Aman, and I were instrumental in scaling Licious as the most loved freshly cut meat brand in the country over the last few years and our network knew that about us. Our initial funding came from this trust coupled with the growth projections of the pet care industry. Several of our angel investors like Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta had once been colleagues. Further, the opportunity for growth within the pet care sector brought us investments from Saama Capital, DSG Partners, Titan Capital and others.

Why did Mr. Varun Sadana choosed the pet parent community over any other space?
It was based on the potential that the pet care industry had coupled with my own journey as a pet parent. India has a pet population of 32 MN currently, which is growing at a rate of >12% annually. An average pet parent currently spends a minimum of Rs 1000/month on their pet, which translates to an opportunity size of more than USD 5 BN. The organised market at this point is less than 20% of the total opportunity size currently. This shows how under-served this sector is and we wanted to tap into this growth early.
To give you further insight, the packaged pet food penetration is less than 7% in India whereas, in the US and Europe, it is upward of 70%. This gap will be narrowed down in the next 5-10 years wherein a large organised market is bound to get created.
On a similar note, the average lifespan of a dog in developed countries is 25-30% more than that of a dog in India. As a pet parent, I truly believe this needs to change. While the US, for example, has a vet for every 1500 pet households, the same for India is between 5-6000 pet households. We’re trying to change this with the accessibility of online vet consultation.
Do you feel like participating in CSR initiatives, and what motivates Mr. Sadana?
One of the pillars of our business is our community of pet parents and we do a lot of activations to keep them engaged. We don’t see them as CSR but we have so far organised almost 10 adoption and vaccination drives over the last year in different parts of the country. Our drives are unique, they’re not just limited to helping people adopt pets. We understand that becoming a pet parent is a big life change so at the drive we always have a vet and a pet behaviour expert from our team, who counsel new parents in-depth about the challenges they may face in the coming months. We also vaccinate and deworm the new pets on the spot to help parents kick off parenthood smoothly. They also leave with a pet started kit with everything one may need in the first month of becoming a pet parent. This is something that we’ll only do more of as we grow.
Elaborate on the challenges you encountered while establishing Supertails.
The biggest challenge in the sector of pet care is to change the mindset of the customer. Pets are traditionally treated like kids and in Indian households, dogs and cats eat what the kids eat. We all know of stories where dogs drink milk with the family at tea time, they eat the same curry, vegetables, and chapatis that get made at home, and if not that, we definitely know of families that feed their pets table scraps. Dogs and cats aren’t meant to have food with spices, and definitely need regular exercises and health checkups like humans do. With the gap in access to credible information, we see the health and eventual lifespan of a pet reduce in the country.
The biggest shift that we’re leading at Supertails is to begin conversations about health, nutrition, and training for pets. To talk about training a little more, a major segment of pet parents today don’t think training is important, many see it as a ‘good to have’ and many find it unnecessary, whereas not understanding a pet’s behaviour and needs is the biggest cause of pet abandonment. The same reason why training is an essential service in countries like Singapore.
This article is drafted by Prittle Prattle News in the form of an Interview.
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