Six years of making pet products: what we've learned

In 2020, in the middle of a year that made everyone reconsider their plans, we started Poteho. The idea was not complicated: make pet products we would actually use with our own animals, and treat the shops and brands that sell them the way we would want to be treated.

Six years on, we ship to retailers across more than thirty countries. Along the way we learned some things the easy way and more things the hard way. Here are the ones worth writing down.

The animal is the customer

Our sample room has hosted every kind of tester: office dogs on payroll, resident cats with strong opinions, and a rotating cast of neighbor pets. The pattern never broke. Products designed to impress a buyer photograph well; products designed for the animal get reordered. A bed is not bought twice because it looked good in the showroom. It is bought again because a dog slept on it for four years and the store got asked for the name.

Boring usually wins

The zippers that never jam, the stitching at every stress point, the swivel clips that survive salt air and -10 degree mornings. Nobody writes reviews praising a buckle that worked for five years, and that is exactly the point. Most of good product design is the absence of complaints.

Small orders deserve real attention

We started small ourselves, so we never built the business around minimums that crush a first-time shop. A store testing fifty units is not a lesser customer than a chain ordering ten thousand. Every big account we have today started as someone's careful little test order.

Pets are family, in the data and in person

The pet market grew through these six years while other categories wobbled, and the reason is visible in every order: people stopped thinking of food and gear as expenses and started thinking of them as part of the household budget, right next to the kids' shoes. We see it in what sells, and we live it at home like everyone else.

What has not changed

We still test everything on our own animals before it ships. We still answer emails like a small company, because the day we stop is the day we become something else.

To the shops, the brands, and the pet parents who trusted a young company over the last six years: thank you. Milo the office cat, who has approved every catalog since 2020, would say the same, but she is on the warmest sample bed in the building and will not be disturbed.