Transforming Smart Pet Technology

Key Takeaways

Keeping Up With Pets in a Post-Covid World

Many pet parents became very invested in their pet’s daily lives during the pandemic. That desire to stay connected and ensure their health and happiness is persisting. Smart pet technology like the Wagz collar provides pet parents a non-invasive way to keep tabs on their pet’s wellbeing. Innovative pet technology allows pet parents to stay connected to their pet. For instance, with Wagz products, pet parents can check on their dog's location, they can check on their dog's activity for the day, how they're walking, how they're sleeping, etc. - which really allows parents to feel connected to their pet.

Designing a “Smart” Business Model

Smart pet technology like Wagz is designed to both meet the consumer's evolving needs while also providing the business with recurring revenue and partnership opportunities.  Two examples of recurring revenue and partnership opportunities include collar subscriptions and consumption-based food-reordering. Wagz’s upcoming smart pet bowl could change how pet parents shop for food. As Anderton highlighted, “[the smart bowl] has the ability to reorder food once you're out of it; we call it auto replenish. It's like a subscription that you would see for traditional food, but it's based on consumption, not on time… it provides more convenience for the consumer, and they never get more food than they need.”

Leveraging Data to Improve Pet Care

Smart pet technology increasingly draws on data and AI to provide pet owners with insights on their pet’s lifestyles. These innovative technologies have the ability to catch potential issues earlier by identifying deviations from normal behavior like poor sleep, abnormal activity or a change in eating habits. Anderton shared, “We have AI built into our platform and we can do trend analysis and understand if there's a behavior change… this is really allowing an added resource to parents to have visibility into their overall pet's wellbeing. And we see a lot of innovation coming down the road that will add more capabilities as time goes on.”

The Future of Connected Pet Health

Wagz sees an opportunity to do more than just collect data on pet wellness - and continues to explore ways to deliver this data back to pet parents.  One ongoing idea is to use voice technology to allow pet parents to engage with their pet's data.  The concept includes asking the Wagz app how your pet is doing and receiving a voice response indicating health and activity such as “Fido got enough exercise, slept eight hours and burned 1,250 calories walking 5.2 miles.”