________________________________________________________________________________ AlphaPet
Ventures GmbH
▲ Marco Hierling
business is ePetWorld, which was founded in 2012. In 2016, we merged the two companies and AlphaPet came to life. We started out as an e-commerce platform in Germany selling the most relevant and premium dog and cat food bands. Our pitch to customers was that we offer a curated assortment and, no matter what they buy, they’ ve made a good choice for their pet. Over time, we’ ve evolved our business model from e-commerce to own branded retail due to the white spaces and emerging trends in the markets. Wildes Land was one of the first brands we developed on our own, in 2015, and it was a huge success. From this success we generated more and more customers for our brands and gained notoriety; after a year, the first retailers approached us. Because of that, we changed our strategy again from pure e-commerce to multichannel including B2B and D2C.
“ Soon after, we completed our first acquisition of a market-leading premium dog food brand in Germany – Wolfsblut – and this really accelerated our journey towards full own-brand sales,” Marco continues.“ Our strategy behind this was to build a tech-driven
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