PrettyLitter is the color-changing health monitoring cat litter with advanced odor control.
Direct-to-consumer Subscription Cat Litter Company • B2C Consumer Packaged Goods • Joined at 8 people • Led product marketing through $1.4BN acquisition by Mars, Inc.
Deliverables: Positioning & Messaging, Branding, Research, Go-To-Market Strategy, Demand Generation
Business challenge
Stalled Growth | After early traction, PrettyLitter's growth had flatlined with costs to acquire customers (CAC) rising rapidly.
Category Creation | Consumers treated cat litter like a commodity, shopping on price per pound alone.
Consumer Insight
#1: The obvious hero is actually the sidekick
Leveraging consumer insights research, I helped the team learn that while the color-changing, health monitoring feature of PrettyLitter was scroll-stopping, and incredibly memorable, consumers hire their cat litter for nearly one job alone: odor control. Incidentally, it turned out that PrettyLitter’s bright white silica gel crystals, chosen to best show off the color change, were actually incredible at odor control.
Five years later, when PrettyLitter was acquired for $1.4BN by Mars Inc, the folks at McKinsey confirmed this user truth, originally found through bootstrapped methods, with a scaled national study.
#2: Other cat brands made you feel like a cringey cat lady
In my extensive competitive research, walking pet aisles at grocery, big-box, and specialty stores, and scrolling digital shelves online, I found that existing brands either leaned into value, science, or sustainability, and all with a cartoonish, mom & pop feel. There was certainly an audience for this approach, but could we steal the whitespace left behind?
#3: If cat food was solely for cats, it would be mouse flavor.
Any product development and marketing we did had to appeal first and foremost to the human purchaser and inspire and comfort them.
Strategic Choice
#1 - Rebrand & Reposition | I developed a new brand for PrettyLitter focused on how clean this beautiful, bright white, odor-absorbing litter could make your house feel. While the color-change feature was still an important point of difference and the core underpinning the audacious colorful rebrand, a feeling of calm cleanliness took precedence.
Other cat litters made you feel like a cringey cat lady, PrettyLitter became a brand so inspiring consumers would reach out saying they liked the brand so much they wanted to buy it even though they did not have a cat.
It was for the millions of cat parents who were totally obsessed with their cats, but didn’t necessarily want that to be the first thing you know about them.
#2 - Value Propositions Driven by Market Research | I conducted message testing at scale in Meta until I had a clear stack rank of reasons to believe to use on new packaging: Odor Control, Convenience, and Health Monitoring.
#3 - "Brandformance" Marketing | I creative directed ads to inspire a “cool” factor missing from other cat brands, leveraging humor and polished sets with an obsessive focus on tying messaging back to those key value propositions. If it was funny or beautiful but didn’t instantly make you believe your home would be more pleasant, your life easier or your cat more pampered, then it wasn’t going to get made.
Work Shipped
• New Brand Guide (Positioning, Messaging, Visuals)
• Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework for the category
• New retail and DTC packaging
• Retail launch GTM plan and execution
• Sales Pitch Decks for selling into retailers
• 1500 “Brandformance” ads per year to test and learn with
• Product positioning work led to Martha Stewart partnership focused on her authority in cultivating a pleasant home
Result
Competitive Moat | The brand was so strong, and grounded in consumer insights, that when knock-offs finally hit the scene, they struggled to break 1% market share. These copy-cats misunderstood the consumer need that PrettyLitter was addressing and led with health science, most of them ending up in the discount bin on the path to retirement.
2x Growth YoY | The stalled growth kicked up as soon as the new ad messaging was launched and supercharged once the premium packaging to match that messaging hit digital shelves. Sales grew 2x year over year for 4 years under this engine.
3x Sales Expectations | PrettyLitter maintained pricing power throughout its growth. The online consumer fervor soon got the attention of major retailers. While PrettyLitter could pick which retailer to launch with, we went with brand-aligned who allowed a comprehensive in-store display that allowed us to tell our story. The launch TRIPLED sales expectations. The brand then parlayed that success into a favorable partnership with Walmart.