Fuzzy is a subscription-based healthcare startup whose mission is to make pet care accessible, affordable, and delightful for every furry friend. Aimed to bring the booming telehealth model to the pet industry, Fuzzy provides owners with 24/7 live chat and veterinarian-guided training, support, and shopping options. Customers could subscribe for monthly or annual memberships and get their pets’ medications, supplements, and pet food delivered right to their door.
To help alleviate some of the strain on the industry after the surge of pet ownership throughout the last few years, Fuzzy led the shift to more telehealth services, encouraging pet parents to consider the health of their pets on a more regular basis to aid in their longevity.
Like many startups, Fuzzy has explored various routes in pursuit of product-market fit. Once the pandemic hit in 2020, they saw a growing trend in telemedicine and wanted to translate those services to pet care. This prompted Fuzzy to create a digitally native platform for all pet care needs. Due to their iterative approach, Fuzzy knew they would have an evolving list of needs and required a flexible development partner to keep up with their demands.
Instead of working with a recruitment agency that would take a hefty commission fee and likely months to source suitable candidates, Fuzzy decided to work with Rootstrap, which had a pool of developers they could hire immediately. Moreover, if business goals were changed and projects had to be adjusted, Rootstrap had the means to reassign resources as needed.
Rootstrap was handed an existing Shopify site that made many enhancements to support Fuzzy’s robust business model. Since Fuzzy sold both goods (pet food) and services (telemedicine), Rootstrap had to move away from the standard Shopify site and create a custom backend to address their atypical eCommerce need. They built specialized detail pages for each product and also customized the checkout flow by removing some steps, adding fields, and building a payment integration flow.
As part of Fuzzy’s commitment to customer satisfaction, they offered flexible subscription terms to their customers. Pet owners could choose if they wanted to receive pet food, medicine, and supplies every 1, 2, 3, or 6 months, meaning Rootstrap’s engineering team had to create unique workflows for each scenario. They also had a freemium experience, which introduced additional complexities the engineers had to tackle. In addition to the front and backend work that was completed, Rootstrap also provided QA services and worked on ad-hoc maintenance requests for Fuzzy.
Rootstrap was tasked to complete a design overhaul on Fuzzy’s Blog, which was initially in plain text. They started with a discovery phase and then built out the UX/UI to align with Fuzzy’s brand identity and create a more seamless experience for readers leveraging Contentful, a content manager. In addition to the design, Rootstrap also created filter functionalities for searchability so that users can easily find articles regarding pet types and pet health. Lastly, in order to build community and increase user engagement, Rootstrap helped develop the “Pet of the Year” program, where customers were prompted to submit a picture of their cat or dog, and the winner, voted by the Fuzzy community, would be promoted on the Academy blog page.
Rootstrap redesigned and rebuilt Kennel, Fuzzy’s Vet portal, to create a more welcoming experience for the influx of Veterinary partnership requests Fuzzy was receiving due to the growing demands of pet owners. Rootstrap added a host of new functionalities, effectively positioning Kennel as a database where Vets could see their patients’ information, including historical medical records, prescription medication information, photos, and chat conversations. Rootstrap also developed video functionality so vets could use this portal to call pet owners for their scheduled medical appointments.
The mobile app was a portal where Fuzzy’s customers could see their pets' profiles, update food subscriptions and medical prescriptions, and manage their overall accounts. Rootstrap improved the chat experience by adding a bot with auto-generated questions, which made the user's interaction with the agents more dynamic. This included maintaining a library section created by the veterinarians themselves, with articles for veterinary care. Similar to Kennel, Rootstrap developed video chatting functionality for their pets’ appointments.
The questionnaires were designed as an engagement strategy for Fuzzy to hit revenue goals. They aimed to get users' information about their pets and make recommendations/upsell medicine and product subscriptions. However, given the nature of these quizzes, any modifications or edit requests would fall on the developers. In order to alleviate the number of dev requests, Rootstrap’s engineers created an Admin site that would allow Fuzzy’s internal team to generate and maintain the questionnaires on their own. Rootstrap built all the logic of creating the different quizzes from the ground up and provided a self-service portal accessible to non-technical team members.
