Data was a pet peeve for this dog wellness company until a streamlined data strategy helped unleash their potential.
Maev was founded in 2018 to help busy people balance their lives with the all-encompassing responsibility of raising a healthy, happy dog. While Maev began as a dog-loving community and a “pet project” for its co-founders, it has grown into a subscription service that ships vet-backed, human-grade food and supplements to dog owners nationwide.
People don’t usually love their pet’s products, despite how much they love their pets. But because Maev emerged out of a community who cares deeply about the health and well-being of dogs, Maev’s human-grade raw food and dog health products finally provide pet products worth barking over.
As Maev grew, they encountered a two-part problem due to the complexity of shipping raw, frozen dog food. When shipping delays occurred, on the customer side, the delivered food was thawed and customers didn’t feel comfortable serving it to their dogs. On the business side, because Maev would have to re-ship the order, their COGS would double, their margin suffered, and customer support time increased to ensure customers stayed happy during the delays.
To make matters worse, the team couldn’t figure out why the delays occurred.
Trying to track down answers to the shipping woes and calculating metrics such as lifetime value, churn, and CAC became CEO Katie Spies’ side job. So, Katie was not only responsible for running the company, but she was knee-deep in spreadsheets, triple-checking her math on metrics calculations, jumping between half a dozen data sources, and having to provide analytics summaries for the rest of the team (who were not always on the same page, literally).
It turned out that data management and analytics weren’t a walk in the dog park. Nor was trying to talk about data and analytics as a team.
Everyone at Maev came from different companies who talked about metrics in different ways, and the half-dozen data dashboards that the team relied on displayed inconsistent information with that the team interpreted in multiple ways.
Here comes the happy ending: after a year of shipping headaches, Dashboard and Excel Hell, Maev met Daasity. Now, all of Maev’s data is in one place, metrics are calculated automatically and refreshed daily, and Katie could finally quit her side job as Chief Analyst.
With all of their data in one place and the newfound ability to easily track data and metrics with Daasity’s dashboards, the Maev team was able to unlock a couple of major insights.
First, they solved their shipping problem. Using Daasity’s Operations dashboard, they identified packages shipped through UPS on Thursdays caused the majority of their shipping delays, which was the reason they had to reship packages to customers. They also discovered that including shipping insurance on all orders saved the company money vs. having to cover the cost of shipping replacement orders.
By shifting their shipping schedule to Monday-Wednesday and adding Shipping insurance, Maev has been able to reduce the need for reships, improve their gross margins, and increase customer lifetime value by providing a better experience. The nice additional benefit is that this update has also reduced their customer support costs since customers aren’t reaching out as frequently to have their orders reshipped.
Maev has been able to cut down on meeting time, reduce the issue of siloed teams due to inconsistent data reporting across different tools, and provide common data language and vocabulary, which benefits team communication and optimizes time—everyone is finally on the same page.
In Maev’s weekly meetings, each team has their own KPIs to track, is confident in their ability to report and plan from their data, and can make data-empowered plans for the brand as a whole.
In short, with Daasity, Maev can easily keep tabs on data and metrics, which means they keep labs (and all other dogs) fed, fit, and happy.
