The Marketing Playbook That Propelled This Cat Food Brand to $100 Million in Less Than a Decade

Smalls co-founders Matthew Michaelson and Veronica del Rosario have quadrupled their advertising budget in the past two years.

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Matthew Michaelson and Veronica del Rosario, the co-founders of Smalls. Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Courtesy company

Matthew Michaelson and Veronica del Rosario relish cat discourse. The co-founders of Smalls, a fresh cat food brand, have funneled all of that collective love, hate, and misunderstanding about the beloved pets, which often get reduced to second billing below dogs, into a marketing machine that propelled their startup to $100 million in annual revenue last year. 

That milestone came after nearly a decade of “slow and steady” growth. The business launched online in 2017, deploying what Michaelson calls a “pretty traditional playbook of direct consumer advertising.” At the time, dogs were getting a lot of love from entrepreneurs. Fresh and raw dog food startups, such as the Farmer’s Dog, Ollie, Maev, Spot & Tango, were flooding the market, selling an alternative to kibble and a way to could improve pets’ health. Amid all those wagging tails, the co-founders saw an opportunity to cater to a chronically underserved customer base of cat parents and the pick eaters they cared for.

“What does it mean to be a cat person? What does it mean to choose cats? There’s a lot more to say. It’s cultural, it’s political, it’s gendered,” says Michaelson, who serves as the company’s CEO. “It’s a little easier to build meaning around it, and therefore build a business around it.”

Similar to the fresh dog food brands, Smalls marketed its more expensive meal time options as a quality upgrade and an act of love. Promotions described the packages as human-grade and protein-packed and often featured before and after pictures of cats with shinier, fuller coats. 

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

“None of that is like rocket science,” says Michaelson, but the company did make a crucial decision from the start to diversify in terms of where that message was being communicated. For the first eight years, when other DTC brands were heavily dependent on Meta, Smalls was spending less than 30 percent of its advertising budget on its platforms and avoided the trap of becoming what he calls “a Meta CPM arbitrage machine disguised as a consumer brand.” When the infamous iOS 14.5 update wiped out third-party cookies in 2021, Smalls was not nearly as exposed as other CPG startups. 

As the company has grown, Meta has become a more efficient advertising tool to use at scale, the co-founders say. The social media platform now represents more than 60 percent of its ad budget, which has grown by 4x over the past two years. 

“We’ve just gotten, I think, a lot better at telling our story and convincing people of the benefits,” says Michaelson. That has a lot to do with the company spending “a lot more money on marketing.”

© Inc.com