How Muddi Pet turned pet-care concentrate into a system
Juexin Wang, founder and CEO of Muddi Pet, makes concentrated, rinse-free pet-care products that customers dilute at home. Wang explains how a towel-cleanse serum became a multi-use system, how Amazon brought in early customers, and why sales growth needs to leave room for profit.
Muddi Pet’s shift from a single-use serum to a concentrate created a system of at-home uses. Wang’s early focus on sales over profit also reinforced the importance of judging channels and prices by what the business keeps, not just what it sells.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I was tired of rebuying the same pre-diluted dry shampoo sprays — mostly water, gone in weeks — and bath day was terrible for my cats, who hate water. So I asked why pet care ships water around in plastic bottles when the part that actually cleans is a small amount of concentrate. Muddi Pet sells that concentrate: one bottle dilutes at home into up to 24 sprays, or works as a rinse-free towel cleanse. No bath, no rinsing, no disposable wipes. The formula is over 98% naturally derived, vegan and cruelty-free — and because we don’t ship water, there’s far less shipping waste and plastic, at a fraction of the cost per clean.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Honestly, the concept did the work. People hear ‘one bottle makes up to 24 sprays’ and they get it right away — the value math and the no-bath part explain themselves. Our first customers came through Amazon, and Amazon is still where most new customers find us today. Our demos do well on social media too — people engage with actually watching the cleanse happen.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: The biggest decision was moving from a single-use product — a serum made only for the towel cleanse — to a true concentrate. We tweaked the formula so one concentrate dilutes at home for multiple uses: the dry shampoo spray, the towel cleanse, all of it. That’s when Muddi Pet stopped being one product and became a system.
The mistake: The mistake was chasing sales over profit early on — growth at any margin. The lesson was to protect the profit: a business that keeps its margins can go further on its own, without outside help. Now every channel and every price gets judged on what we actually keep, not just what we sell.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Pet parents read labels now the way beauty customers always have. They expect cleaner ingredients, no harsh chemicals, and less waste. I came from beauty, so Muddi Pet was built on clean beauty principles from day one: a clean formula — over 98% naturally derived, vegan, cruelty-free, no parabens, sulfates or phthalates — and a less-is-more philosophy. We didn’t really have to adapt to the shift. We were already built for it.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: build something genuinely different. The world doesn’t need another pet shampoo or another pack of disposable wipes — find the thing nobody is questioning, and question it. Ignore: the outside noise. Everyone will have an opinion about what you should do instead. Have faith in your own read, and remember Rome isn’t built in a day.
Thank you to Juexin Wang and the team at Muddi Pet for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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