At first, the stock seemed to be vanishing. Mike Frizell and James Edwards, working in a rough warehouse with worn desks and bags of dog food, worried they were losing inventory. The culprit, they later learned, was a ferret.
It is a funny detail, but it shows what the early days were: two people, a shed, and a lot of animals.
The first real warehouse, a Kennards Storage unit, needed a whole weekend of scrubbing before they could move in.
Frizell was a former investment banker and management consultant. In January 2011 he began working on an idea at Vibewire, a co-working space in Ultimo, Sydney. His motivation was domestic. Buying pet food felt to him like the milk deliveries his family had in the 1990s, something that should just arrive. Next to him sat Edwards, who held a PhD in applied mathematics and a computer science degree and had been building warehousing software. They merged their efforts.
The first stock lived in a 16 square metre shed a block away. The first real warehouse, a Kennards Storage unit, needed a whole weekend of scrubbing before they could move in.
Edwards made an unusual choice. Most startups build the shopfront first. He built the back end, an in-house system called MinPin, to forecast orders and run warehouse flow, because the real enemy was delivery. Pet food bags in 2012 were mostly paper, weighed about 20kg and burst easily. Solve that, he reasoned, and the rest follows. AirTree founder Craig Blair came in as adviser and Chair, and AirTree backed the company.
Then came the name. The business launched as Paws for Life. By 2014 the range had grown beyond cats and dogs, and on radio the name was a mess: paws could sound like pause, for like four. They renamed it Pet Circle. The change took about a month and traffic dipped briefly. Frizell said afterwards that customers knew who they were.
Growth afterwards was steep. Turnover passed A$70m by mid-2017, with more than 130 staff. In December 2021 a A$125m round valued the company above A$1bn, and in 2023 it added pet insurance.
Frizell has said he learned to treat data as one input, not the final word, and to stay close to customers by being one himself. The warehouse has moved four times since the shed. The instinct to fix the heavy, unglamorous problem first has not.