Cracking the US market with Lintbells

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Audio Transcript

Tim Smallbone

Hello and welcome to Inflexion Point, the podcast that explores those crucial moments in a company's journey that change the trajectory of success. Through conversations with business founders and entrepreneurs, we'll explore what those moments look like and how to recognize and harness them. And in this episode, we're telling the story of a pet health startup and how it was transformed into a leading multinational brand.

Fiona Hope

You've got the team, you've got inventory, you've got the right level of brand awareness, you've got the right commercial partnerships. To get all of those together at the same time is when the magic starts to happen. And that's the point that we're now at.

Dr John Howie

This opportunity globally is so huge, there just isn't really a limit to where the business can go. So in an ideal world, I'd have done that quicker than I did.

Tim Smallbone

I'm Tim Smallbone. In my 20 years as a partner at Inflexion, I've been lucky enough to witness a huge number of those moments that are part of every success story. Lintbells was founded in 2006. Since then, it has grown to an award-winning, multinational pet health company. You might know it better as YuMOVE, the UK's #1 veterinary joint supplement brand. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. John Howie, co-founder of Lintbells and Chief Innovation Officer, a role he took on last year to put greater focus on Lintbells' pipeline of new products and innovation and sustainability goals. Alongside John, we have Fiona Hope, who took over from John as CEO in 2022. Welcome to you both. Thanks for joining me. Fiona, I wonder if you could just start off, just tell me a little bit about what Lintbells does and what does YuMOVE do?

Fiona Hope

What we are, is one of the world's leading pet supplements businesses, and what we do is offer scientifically backed pet health supplements.

Tim Smallbone

Specifically, this is for dogs.

Fiona Hope

We do products mainly for dogs, but we also do cats and we also have a horse product and we also have a human product for those people who need to keep up with their newly mobile pets.

Tim Smallbone

John, you founded the business. Where did the idea come from?

Dr John Howie

Well, I was doing some consultancy for one of the global pet food brands. And I was specifically looking at the science of nutrition and the benefits I could bring. And it became apparent that actually you couldn't use everything in a dog food. Not all ingredients would go into pet foods and still give the benefit. So that gave me the idea for doing it via the supplement route instead. So I got together with my co-founder John, we tried out our first product idea on his dog. It seemed to work, so we thought we'd better have a go.

Tim Smallbone

It was a beloved pet, a Labrador that was on his last legs and you brought it back to life. Is there some story like that?

Dr John Howie

Yeah, so Charlie, John's dog, he was a chocolate Labrador, moulted all over the place like all chocolate Labradors do, was getting a bit stiff like all Labradors do. And so the first product was actually a skin and coat supplement. We'd used science to establish it to make sure that it did the job of improving skin health, reducing moulting, that sort of thing. And we tried that out on him and it made the Hoover not have to work quite so hard in the house. And then when he got stiff, we developed our second product, YuMOVE, and that really helped him in terms of his mobility and he lived to the ripe old age of 14, which is good going for a Labrador.

Tim Smallbone

We're about to have a discussion about a subject which I'm sure has not been discussed on any podcast before. We're going to discuss green-lipped mussels. John, tell us. Tell us why green-lipped mussels are so vital to this story.

Dr John Howie

Well, we were looking for science that would support different ingredients that would support mobility in dogs. And so we did a full trawl of all of the potential ingredients we could use. And one of them that came out really strongly was green-lipped mussel. It's A mollusk that lives in New Zealand. It's only found in the coastal waters of New Zealand. But there's lots of research, both in the human and in the pet space, that showed that these particular little critters were particularly good for joint health. And so we started our research work looking at those to see what we could do from a dog point of view.

Tim Smallbone

So we have to harvest these mussels from a fjord in New Zealand. The entire business depends upon this annual harvest.

Dr John Howie

We've opened it up a lot now. All these mussels are farmed, so it's a very sustainable approach to ingredient sourcing. But it means now that we can pretty much keep our harvest going the full year-round. We've got lots of different areas that we source from. But they are still very unique. You can't just get them from absolutely anywhere. You need to know exactly where you're looking and exactly what time of year you're looking for them.

Tim Smallbone

So Fiona, we have a product. How do we sell it?

Fiona Hope

When I joined the business, we were already a multi-channel business, and we've really developed our D2C business. And that's for a couple of reasons. It's not just because we have great margins and so on, but it's also because we really understand the way that pet owners consume our brand and our product. And because we talk to them a lot, because we have a great customer service team, it means that they give it to us both barrels, what they like about our product and our service and what they would want us to be better at. And we've just found a way to industrialize that through a great D2C proposition.

Tim Smallbone

You're the CEO of the business now, but you didn't join as the CEO. Tell me about the step up and the journey that you went on.

Fiona Hope

Yeah, so I joined the business five years ago as CCO, which meant that I was looking after the commercial teams and marketing teams, which is my functional background. But between joining and then becoming CEO, I picked up responsibility for the people and culture side of the business and then operations as well. So for me, it was a fairly seamless transition, obviously involved some challenges that I hadn't experienced before, but it felt comfortable and it felt natural. And John handed over the baton in a very elegant and very supportive way, and so it worked pretty well, and John and I have obviously worked together for three and a half years up until that point, so... We understood each other very well. And I think one of the things that's really worked in helping us to develop the business in partnership is that I think we communicate very well and very openly. And I think that's one of the keys to picking up the reins, because I suspect it may have been harder for John than me, actually.

Tim Smallbone

It was a big moment for a founder to hand over to someone else. How did that feel?

Dr John Howie

It was already part of the plan. I'd always had a philosophy that no business should be dependent upon the founder. And if you can't build a business that can function without you in it, then you haven't actually finally succeeded in that piece. And indeed, when looking for the CCO role, looking for finding Fiona, that had been part of the thinking — to say, right, I need to find somebody that not only is phenomenal at what they do, but has the ability to, and the aspiration for that matter, to take on the CEO job and do it in a way that keeps true to the business. And Fiona's got phenomenal drive, phenomenal ambition for the business, but she understands how it ticks. She understands how our customers tick. She understands how our people tick. And it's really important that, and certainly from a founder's point of view, that you can see that flow through. So yeah, when the moment came, it was quite emotional. It surprised me. I'm not a very emotional guy. It rather surprised me. We did the official handover in front of the entire business, but I think it's gone really well. From my perspective, I think we've had a very smooth transition.

Tim Smallbone

You had a successful business selling in the UK. The inflection point that transformed everything was going to the US. What brought that decision on?

Dr John Howie

To be quite frank, it was the EU referendum. We had a very successful business running in the EU. It was developing well. Woke up the morning of the referendum result and essentially looked at the news, thought, okay, it's going to be pretty tough in the EU for a few years. We needed another part to the plan. And the US was the obvious market to go for. It's the largest market in the world. We already understood our competitors over there. And we had a lot of experience in terms of pet owners and their experience with the product. So it seemed like the obvious place to go. Quite a big thing to bite off and would require a lot of extra investment and so on, which was part of the journey to finding our partnership with Inflexion. But at the time it was, we need to keep growing and we need the opportunities to be there and the US market was that.

Tim Smallbone

How well do you think with hindsight you understood the challenge you were taking on?

Dr John Howie

If I'm perfectly honest, not really. We had a reasonable perspective, but I don't think we'd fully understood the scale of what we had to do, and the level of investment that it would take. And I suspect we overestimated our own ability in the sense that we had become a very successful brand within the UK. So much of what we were doing at the time, we decided just to translate across to the US market, forgetting that actually in the US market, we were effectively like a startup again. So, we forgot all the startup principles and went in like we were a main brand and that didn't really work first time through.

Tim Smallbone

You took this on, did you? You led this US push?

Fiona Hope

Yes, I did. And I remember John and I had a very interesting conversation where I said to John, John, take me back again. Exactly how did you crack the UK market? What steps, in which order? And basically going back to re-look at that journey and then effectively, industrializing it for the US, but doing it in a logical order for where the brand stood in the US versus where we hoped it stood, which is where it was in the UK, I think was a very material conversation actually, because we're now doing a lot of the things in the US that John was doing in the UK, but we're able to do them faster and we're able to invest in them in a bigger way than John would have been able to do with his co-founding partner back in 2006.

Dr John Howie

There are certain points in your founder's journey, certain conversations you really remember and say, actually, that was a seminal moment. And that conversation was definitely one of them. What's interesting post that conversation is because I have that feeling of how things were progressing through the UK as we built it up, going into the US market since then, you can go, okay, we were not at this stage at this point. You almost can feel your progress. And so I can sit there with the US teams and say, right, guys, actually you are six months ahead of where we were. You're 12 months ahead of where we were. So it's really helpful for me personally just to be able to see that progress, and see all the same markers that we were seeing in the UK developing now in the US market.

Tim Smallbone

We're a consumer product, but we're also a healthcare product. So there was a debate about do we sell through vets or do we try and go direct?

Fiona Hope

Yes, and you know, the answer is we need to do both. We know now that the advocacy that we get from clinicians in the veterinary industry is really critical. So whilst not everybody will end up buying for their pet from vets, they always take the advice of their vets. And actually, so many vets, even if they don't sell YuMove, they recommend that people buy YuMove. And it seems when you can get very excitable about a new market and think you can put it on steroids very quickly, especially if you've got investment behind you, but you need to remember that there are certain steps that are just tough and a slog, but really necessary. And certainly, engaging the veterinary industry in the US was definitely one of those. And we're sort of three years into that, journey now. But now we have vets selling to vets because they can feel the efficacy of the product. And as John says, that's when you really know that you're starting to get the flywheel moving and all of that investment, time and effort and people and so on is really worthwhile. Some things have no shortcuts, or fewer shortcuts to them.

Tim Smallbone

And we did an acquisition?

Fiona Hope

We did do an acquisition at the back end of last year. We acquired a business called Walking Pets, based just out of Boston. And what Walking Pets allows us to do is to really develop that or live up to that customer idea, which is about keeping pets active for life. Because what Walking Pets do is that they produce and manufacture wheelchairs and splints and other mobility support. So it means that we've just been able to broaden out ways in which we deliver to our customers against that proposition of keeping pets active for life.

Tim Smallbone

Which actually is a really great visual story, which we can't show on a podcast, but part of the attraction was that was the enormous YouTube following that company had.

Dr John Howie

It's enormous, yeah, relative to the sorts of following that we were able to achieve. It's quite incredible. And some of the videos you see where an entire rescue centre dedicated to dogs in wheelchairs, and then they take them out for a walk or take them on the beach. And you can see these dogs flying down the beach, thoroughly enjoying themselves. And yeah, that's really rich content for social media channels.

Tim Smallbone

Taking any consumer products into a mass market, you always have to talk about Amazon. What was our story on that? Did we decide to go with them or not go with them? Because they can easily take over your business.

Dr John Howie

Yeah, we went with Amazon very early on, both in our journey and also their journey into pets. So they actually came to us. We were already a successful business. We had a small DTC business as part of the model. We were already in vets. We were in retail as well. But the internet was in its infancy from a retailing point of view at that time, and Amazon hadn't established a pet channel within the UK. And so they approached us and said, we'd like you to be one of our sort of flagship brands. You seem to be keen on this sort of thing. So can we work together? So, we actually worked with them to build up both our brand and theirs in the pet space. So, It was actually a very equitable relationship and has been a very successful one, certainly for us and also I think for Amazon as well.

Fiona Hope

This was a really important point in Lintbells' journey, actually it was before my time, but I think this is where John made a really brave decision, in the early stages of the business, because Amazon at that point, obviously was still a huge organisation. And it was also less well known than it is now. So, I think to take what would have been a bit of a business risk in going into Amazon and feeling like you could take on Amazon and make Amazon useful to you in the context of what you were trying to do in the business was a big decision. And we've all benefited from that, actually, because now on Amazon, we have 50,000 reviews. They are visible globally. So, it's really helped us in the US. And Amazon are a good partner for us because a lot of people see, especially at that point, would have seen Amazon like they used to see Tesco, don't have too much of your share in Tesco or Asda or Sainsbury's because it becomes very difficult commercially when you're renegotiating terms. And I think John's foresight and confidence and bravery actually in getting in there first has really helped the business.

Tim Smallbone

The other big challenge with direct-to-consumer businesses is how much you spend on Google marketing; how do we cope with that? How do we ensure that we get good bang for our buck?

Fiona Hope

One of the other, I think, inflection points in our business was when we started to invest in TV advertising. And we did that from about 2019, we started to make small investments in TV advertising. And we measured it, monitored it really well, such that when COVID hit and the TV market became very soft, that was another really good decision, a good inflection point where we knew exactly what TV would contribute to our acquisition funnel and how much it would cost us. And therefore, we were very confident about starting to invest really significantly in TV, but getting great value for money whilst we did it. So what it means is that our brand search is very high relative, especially to other joint supplements or other pet care brands actually. And I mean, when I started in the business, I think our brand awareness on YuMove was maybe sort of, it was certainly sub 20%. And over the last six months, we've hit 50% on some months because, you know, we measure it and we've invested consistently in it. And we've also invested consistently in understanding exactly how that funnel translates down all the way through awareness, consideration, acquisition, and then to loyal users. So it's a very measurable investment model. And again, I think that's served us to keep us confident in how we're investing and when we're investing and so on. So we have high brand search.

Tim Smallbone

In the middle of this story, of course, COVID hits. I mean, tell us how that felt, John. You must have been pretty horrified to suddenly find that we couldn't get to work.

Dr John Howie

Yeah, it was quite an interesting experience, really. I mean, I still remember the week where the start of the week, I had a plan up on the wall of how we were going to turn ourselves into a billion-dollar brand. And at the end of the week, I was trying to work out how we were going to cope with surviving through COVID. So, it was quite a dramatic change in a short space of time. We were lucky in some respects, as we had invested quite heavily in technology ahead of the curve. And so We were able to get everybody working from home really quickly and get everybody safe, which was the first priority. But then it was the pace at which we moved, I think, that really helped in the business. And all credit to Fiona, spotted the gap in the market from a TV point of view, turned an ad round in four weeks, whilst everybody's locked down. It was quite an incredible achievement, actually, and then really made the most of that opportunity whilst managing to keep everybody secure and feeling comfortable with what they were doing and then trying to cope with an absolutely phenomenal growth rate at the same time. We had a lot of work and a lot of investment to do in that period.

Tim Smallbone

And people were spending a lot more time with their pets, of course, and there was a boom in dog ownership, people buying puppies.

Fiona Hope

Yeah, there is that we are still yet to benefit from, to be honest, because the average age of one of our pet customers would be between sort of 7 and 8. And so all of those COVID puppies are due to come our way. But what we really invested in was a soft media market. As you say, people spent more time with their pets because they were at home. This was when, I think, more people started to be aware of the emotional role that pets play in their lives. And people were searching much more. They were spending a lot more time on the internet. They also were quite flushed with cash. They weren't feeling the pain — you know, there was quite a lot of cash available to people who were on furlough and so on. So there were lots of very right features in the market that meant that investment was, TV investment really made sense. But John, I will correct you, we made the TV ad in 10 days, not four weeks. So just in case you thought we were languishing, a little bit. It was even faster than you suggested.

Tim Smallbone

We've inevitably talked a lot about YuMove, but we're in a product-rich business. What are the other products we have in the pipeline?

Dr John Howie

Well, we've focused our product portfolio on the key health conditions that dogs have, and that's always been part of it. We've looked at what the health benefit we're trying to provide is first and then worked out how to do it from there. So our key areas now, we started with skin health, that was the first product. We've now got a very good digestive health range. Last year we launched in the dental health space. We also have calming supplements for dogs as well. But a lot of our innovation has gone into the joint health space over the last five, six years. So, we continue to innovate in that space as well.

Tim Smallbone

And where next, geography wise, is this as far as we're going to go or are we going to try and crack another market?

Fiona Hope

We will definitely crack more markets. We've always, we've taken the view there over the last couple of years that you need to spend quite a lot and attend to the US if you're going to convert it with some real conviction. And trying to attack any other markets at the same time would just dilute our effort in the US. But Europe being geographically very much closer to us is a more fragmented market, though, in terms of supplements. And we also need to make sure that we've got the right infrastructure on the ground to be successful there. But we will certainly go to Europe. We're talking about New Zealand, Australia. We don't see anything out there that's better than YuMove. So, we have an opportunity and an obligation to take YuMove out to more markets.

Tim Smallbone

Some reflections, John. Can you reflect back key moments, key sort of learnings, key lessons that you might want to share?

Dr John Howie

If I was doing it again, I'd go faster. I would invest harder than I did. I would take on great people quicker. So, there's a lot of investment in all of those statements. But as Fiona's mentioned, this opportunity globally is so huge, there just isn't really a limit to where the business can go. So, in an ideal world, I'd have done that quicker than I did. We made some good decisions. We made some good investments, but we could have done more, I think. So yeah, I would invest harder is the main one.#

Tim Smallbone

Would you try to go to the US sooner than you did?

Dr John Howie

We did look at it a couple of times. And in fact, back in, I think it was, 2014, Amazon US approached us, having seen what we'd done in the UK. In an ideal world, would have gone then. The challenge we had at that time is we needed to keep up the product performance, and so we needed our supply chain and our quality control measures to stay with the business. And so, at the time, there was a concern that we just didn't have that fully set up to cope with the sort of volume that... that the US business was offering us. In an ideal world, I'd have done it, but I think we could have broken the business trying to do it. So, whilst I'd love to, I think it was the right decision not to at the time.

Tim Smallbone

And Fiona, would you ever take another product into the US? And if you did, what have you learned?

Fiona Hope

I have learned to trust the research, I think, and to make sure you've really unearthed everything that has worked in your domestic market, but take absolute account of the conditions that you are launching into, which are always different. And I'd say in respect of our situation, certainly the brand development that we required in order to be successful commercially, I think we under-assumed that in the early stages.

Tim Smallbone

To invest more in the brand.

Fiona Hope

You have to get people all the way through the funnel, if you like. And you can't just do that by being present on Amazon or by being in a few vet clinics and so on. I learned this previously in my career. It's about getting all of those components to the right place at the same time. That is the magic. So you've got the team, you've got inventory, you've got the right level of brand awareness, you've got the right commercial partnerships. And that's really difficult. But to get all of those together at the same time is when the magic starts to happen. And that's the point that we're now at in the US.

Tim Smallbone

It's a fascinating story. Thank you both very much for joining me. That's it for this episode. My thanks to John and Fiona. Remember to subscribe to Inflexion Point wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss an episode. And check out the Inflexion website if you would like to learn more about how we back ambitious business owners and help them to accelerate sustainable growth. Thanks for listening.

About the episode

Inflexion Point tells the story of Lintbells, the pet health company behind YuMOVE, and how a UK success story set out to crack the US market. Host Tim Smallbone is joined by co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Dr John Howie, and Fiona Hope, who took over as Chief Executive in 2022. They reflect on the moments that shaped it: the science that turned a green-lipped mussel from New Zealand into a joint supplement, the early and brave decision to partner with Amazon, the founder to CEO handover, and the choice to push into the US after the EU referendum. Along the way, they talk building the brand through TV advertising, winning the advocacy of vets, the acquisition of mobility business Walking Pets near Boston, and why getting the team, the inventory, the brand awareness and the commercial partnerships aligned at the same time is when the magic happens.