Harringtons Pet Food
A bespoke Shopify ecommerce platform designed to turn a much-loved pet food brand into a direct, subscription-led customer experience.
- Sector
- Pet food and FMCG ecommerce
- Platform
- Shopify
- Impact
- A scalable direct-to-consumer platform supporting subscriptions, loyalty and repeat purchasing
- Services
- Ecommerce strategy, bespoke Shopify design and development, UX and UI, subscription integration, loyalty, customer reviews, copywriting and performance optimisation
- Website
- harringtonspetfood.com
The challenge
Harringtons is one of the UK’s leading natural pet food brands. Following a major brand evolution, it needed a digital platform that could translate its renewed identity into a more direct and valuable relationship with pet owners.
The brief was to create much more than a product catalogue: a website that helps customers understand an extensive range, find the right products for their pets and purchase them with confidence, with subscriptions, repeat purchasing, loyalty and reviews built in.
Pet food ecommerce
Natural goodness, delivered.
Harringtons is one of the UK’s leading natural pet food brands and part of Inspired Pet Nutrition, the family-owned business behind household names including Wagg, Barking Heads and Meowing Heads.
Following a major brand evolution, Harringtons needed a digital platform that could translate its renewed identity into a more direct and valuable relationship with pet owners.
- Real food
- Real choice
- Natural goodness for all
- Subscribe & save
More than a catalogue
The brief was to create much more than a product catalogue. The website needed to help customers understand an extensive range of dog, cat and small animal food, find the right products for their pets and purchase them with confidence.
It also needed to support subscriptions, repeat purchasing, loyalty and customer reviews, while communicating the brand’s personality and values with clarity.
What we delivered
Pet food is more complicated than it looks. One purchase can involve the animal, its age, a dietary requirement, a preferred recipe, a food format and a pack size, and getting any of it wrong matters to the person buying.
The experience was built around how pet owners actually think, rather than around Harringtons’ internal product structure. Customers narrow the range by pet, food type, age and dietary need, while product pages answer the questions that decide a purchase: what is in it, what it does, how much to feed and what each pack size costs.
The result is a large range that never feels like one, and a route to checkout that stays short whether someone is buying for the first time or setting up a regular delivery.
Subscription-led ecommerce
Repeat purchasing was designed into the journey from the beginning rather than added afterwards, because for most pet owners it is simply how buying works.
Customers choose the products and quantities they want and a delivery rhythm anywhere between every two and every 12 weeks, then adjust, pause or stop it themselves without having to ask. Subscribe to Save takes up to 15% off repeat orders, with free delivery on qualifying purchases.
Convenience without restriction is the principle. The customer keeps control and gets better value, and Harringtons gains a relationship that carries on well past a single order.
Loyalty built around pet owners
The Harringtons Pet Club sits inside the shopping experience rather than alongside it, and rewards more than just spending.
Pet Points come from orders, but also from referrals, reviews, engaging with the brand socially and completing a pet’s profile. They convert into discounts and products, so taking part is worth something real.
That gives the relationship more than one dimension. Subscriptions make buying easy, Pet Club gives people a reason to take part, and reviews from other owners offer reassurance at the moment someone is deciding. Together they build something more durable than a repeat transaction.
Bringing the brand to life
The design system translates Harringtons’ friendly, down-to-earth personality into a confident digital experience. Product presentation, copywriting, imagery and educational content work together to communicate the brand’s core message: real food, real choice and natural goodness for all.
The site also provides space for Harringtons to communicate the wider impact of the brand, including its environmental commitments, tree planting and the millions of meals shared with pet charities across the UK.
Pet advice and educational content extend the experience beyond ecommerce, giving customers useful guidance throughout their pets’ lives while opening new routes into the brand.
The results
The results
Designed for long-term growth
Four years after launch, the bespoke Shopify site remains the centre of Harringtons’ direct-to-consumer activity. Its modular structure has let the experience evolve as customer expectations, promotions and operational requirements changed.
Tens of thousands of five-star reviews now sit throughout the journey, doing the quiet work of reassurance at the moment it matters most.
The quality of that experience was recognised with an Indigo Design Award for UX and UI, which reflects the balance the build had to strike between brand expression, ecommerce function and plain ease of use.
One connected customer experience
The strongest ecommerce experiences never ask customers to think about the systems behind them. Product discovery, subscriptions, loyalty and reviews work as one connected journey rather than four separate ones.
For Harringtons that creates more reasons to come back, while giving the internal team the freedom to introduce new products, collections, promotions and seasonal content without the core experience needing to be rebuilt around them.
Four years after launch, the same platform is still adapting around changing customer expectations and commercial priorities.
Simple on the surface
Behind the friendly customer experience sits a complex ecommerce structure. The site needs to manage multiple species, product types, recipes, pack sizes, ages, dietary requirements, subscription frequencies, discounts, reward points and delivery rules. Our work was to make that complexity feel simple.
Customers can find suitable products without needing to understand the systems working behind the scenes. They can purchase once or subscribe, manage deliveries independently and earn rewards through the same connected experience.
For Harringtons, the platform provides a direct source of customer relationships, purchasing insight and recurring ecommerce activity alongside its established retail presence.
Built for lasting relationships
More than a Shopify website.
It is a long-term ecommerce platform that brings together product discovery, subscription, loyalty, content and customer care, helping Harringtons turn everyday pet food purchases into lasting customer relationships.
