What is Chewy? Chewy Review, Features

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Florida, Chewy has nearly 10,000 team members in 12 regions in the United States. It is positioned as a one-stop e-commerce platform for pet supplies, including food, snacks, medicines, etc. It has established cooperation with more than 1,600 brands in the pet industry, providing customers with more than 45,000 products, and has completed more than 100 million orders since 2011.

Operational Model

Chewy currently has 7 warehouses and logistics centers in the United States. 80% of its users can be covered by the next-day delivery service, and the two-day delivery service covers 100% of the entire United States. Chewy positions itself as "personalized, high-touch customer service to every customer, every day and in every interaction". Because of this, Chewy's operations are quite "heavy". For example:

Fully manual 24-hour customer service instead of Chatbot;

Chewy has built its own information system to collect and track pets' names and characteristics, and send handwritten cards to users on holidays, birthdays, etc.

Chewy's team is also large. As of February 2019, Chewy had 9,833 full-time employees.

AutoShip is a "regular automatic delivery service" on the Chewy platform. When consumers add some consumables that need to be purchased periodically (such as pet food, cat litter, etc.) to the Autoship plan and customize the delivery cycle, Chewy will deliver the goods to the door on schedule and automatically deduct the credit card. Consumers no longer need to place repeated orders.

Development History

-In 2011, Chewy was co-founded by Ryan Cohen and Michael Day, and achieved $26 million in revenue in its first fiscal year. Before being acquired by PetSmart, it received multiple rounds of investment from venture capital firm Volition Capital, mutual fund T. Rowe Price and Blackstone Group, raising a total of at least $236 million.

-In late 2016, Chewy launched its first durable goods brand, Frisco.

-In 2017, the company launched two independent brands, American Journey and Tylee's.

-In April 2017, Petsmart, the largest comprehensive pet service company in the United States, acquired Chewy. People familiar with the matter revealed that the acquisition price was US$3.35 billion, which was higher than the US$3.3 billion that Walmart paid for Jet, setting a record for the highest acquisition in the history of the Internet.

-Since March 2018, Sumit Singh has been the CEO of Chewy. Singh previously worked at Dell and Amazon and is an e-commerce expert.

-In August 2018, Chewy also launched the pharmaceutical service "Chewy Pharmacy" and expanded its product categories.