1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Akash Bedi : Zesty Paws started as a digitally native brand, and it launched on Amazon before it even had a website of its own. It existed because the category frustrated us. The supplement aisle was clinical white bottles and capsules that pets fought you on, for products people give an animal they love. So we built it on three things, palatability, efficacy, and safety, and we summed the whole idea up in three words we still use, Bite Sized. Pet Science. Real science in a format the dog actually wants to take. Soft chews instead of pills. Daily instead of occasional. The approach worked well enough that by 2021 H&H acquired the brand for $610 million, with Amazon still its number one channel at the time.

On what makes it different, I separate two layers. The honest answer on the moat is that it is not the formula, because a formula gets copied. It is the trust the formula and the format build together over time. A chew the dog wants every day, written in plain structure and function language the owner can track, turns into a review base a competitor cannot replicate quickly. That is the part that compounds.

Underneath that is a strategic point I would make to any founder. A lot of winning is just being in the right category, one that is genuinely large and growing, and then earning real consumer pull inside it instead of pushing product through distribution. The same generation that took up its own wellness rituals now extends that to the dog and the cat, so the category is real and it is expanding. A big category plus authentic pull, rooted in actually meeting the need of a pet parent who treats that animal as family, is the Zesty proposition.

And we try to earn that pull with science, not slogans. One example I am proud of. We are one of the first brands in the world to build a dog probiotic from strains taken from a dog’s own gut rather than human or generic sources. Going back to the gut of the dog, basically. The science was strong enough that we took it into the veterinary channel, where a recommendation has to be earned, and the American Kennel Club then made us their official probiotic supplement. We also became a Certified B Corp across North America in early 2024, and we use that as the standard for what we are willing to put on a shelf.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Akash Bedi : Two things really stand out. The first isn’t one big decision, it’s more a habit we built. Because we started online, we were sitting on a huge amount of information about our customers, what they searched for, what they bought, and especially what they wrote in reviews. We learned to read those reviews as research, not just feedback. The clearest example is when we noticed people buying one of our products and using it for something we never intended, basically trying to use it as a natural flea and tick treatment. So we actually made one. We started with a spray and a shampoo, it did well, and then we turned it into chews too. The lesson stuck with me: if you really listen to customers, they will tell you what to build next. A lot of how Zesty Paws grew to more than a hundred products came from paying attention like that.

The second was deciding to stop being just an online brand and go properly into shops as well. Selling online, you win with a good product page and smart advertising. A shelf in a store is a completely different challenge. There are no reviews sitting next to you, you’ve got a few seconds to catch someone’s eye, and the pack has to tell the whole story on its own. It forced us to get much more disciplined about our range and our pricing, so we weren’t training people to wait for a discount. What surprised me was that the two sides started helping each other. People would spot Zesty Paws in a store and then go look us up online, so instead of competing, the channels fed each other.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Akash Bedi : There are three that really matter. The first is the online marketplaces, which is where we began, because that’s where a huge amount of pet shopping and repeat buying actually happens, and the data you get back is genuinely useful, what people search for, what converts, what they tell you in reviews. The second is physical retail, and over the last few years we’ve worked hard to get Zesty Paws into pretty much every kind of store, and more recently into vet clinics, which is the hardest place of all to earn your way into. The third is what we own directly, our email, our subscriptions, and that big base of reviews.

The thing I really believe, and not everyone runs it this way, is that you should treat your strongest online channel as a credibility engine first and a profit center second. The reviews and the visibility you build there create a trust that quietly lifts everything else, even if it costs you a bit of margin to keep it that strong. A lot of brands do the opposite, they squeeze that channel for profit, and then can’t work out why the rest of the business won’t grow.

The other thing I had to learn sounds small but isn’t. You have to run each channel separately, because they all have different economics and different buyers, and pretending they’re the same just causes fights internally. But you have to read demand as one single picture, because the customer doesn’t think in channels. The same person might see us in a store, look us up on their phone, and subscribe three months later, and to them that’s all one relationship with the brand. So we manage the channels apart, but we measure the customer as one.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Akash Bedi : The way I see it, search is splitting into two different habits and you have to be ready for both. There’s still the old one, where someone types a specific worry about their dog straight into Google. And there’s the newer one, where people just ask an assistant like ChatGPT a question and expect one clear answer back, without clicking around at all.

What that’s changed for us is pretty practical. We used to write content mainly to rank for keywords. Now we write it to actually answer the question a worried owner is asking, in plain language, backed by the science. A simple test we use is whether you could pull out a single paragraph and it would still stand on its own as a clear, correct answer, because that is basically what an AI tool does, it lifts a piece and uses it. The funny thing is that kind of writing tends to read better for a real person too.

My honest view is that a lot of brands spent years pumping out content just to game search, and very little of it is going to get picked up by these tools. The ones that did the harder work of creating something genuinely useful, the kind of thing a vet wouldn’t roll their eyes at, are the ones that get quoted. And being chosen by someone credible helps a lot here. When a body like the American Kennel Club has named you their official probiotic, both people and these AI systems treat that as a real signal of trust.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Akash Bedi : It sounds obvious, but it starts with the product actually working. In our world that means the owner has to see a difference in their dog or cat. People buy these things for real worries, an older dog’s joints, a nervous pet, so if it does not deliver, no rewards program is going to save you.

Once it does work, most of what turns someone into a loyal customer happens after they have bought, which is the part a lot of brands ignore. We try to be genuinely useful in that window. We make the subscription easy to pause or change instead of hard to cancel. We send people simple guidance on how to actually use the product so they get a result. And we treat reviews as a conversation, we read them and reply, rather than just collecting stars.

The other thing that has worked well for us is giving people something to feel part of. We ran a campaign called Take a Zesty Pause, built around a simple idea, that the small daily moment of giving your dog their chew is really just a moment of looking after them. People started posting their own versions of it, and it became more of a shared thing than an advert. The reviews we have built up over the years are not just numbers, they are a lot of people who felt listened to, and those are the ones who recommend you to a friend. For me, loyalty is mostly earned in that quiet stretch after the sale, by still being helpful when there is nothing left to sell them.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Akash Bedi : Honestly, the first thing I’d check is whether the category is even big enough to be worth it. I’ve seen really good operators put years into something that was never going to get large, and no amount of clever execution fixes that.

If the category is right, then over the next year I’d spend my energy on the things that make customers come back. For us that is reviews, repeat purchase, and subscribers. They take a long time to build and you can’t fake them later, but once you have them every marketing dollar works harder, because you are not starting from zero with each new customer.

The other thing is focus. Most founders at that stage are running too many products and too many channels for the size of their team. If you can’t explain your range in one sentence, it is probably too wide. So what I would stop is launching things just because you can. A new product or a new retailer always feels like progress, but a lot of it just eats your cash and your attention and gives very little back. Pick the two or three things that actually grow the business and go all in on those.