Why Our Range Is Small

Pawd lists a few hundred products. We looked at several thousand to get there. This is about why the range is the size it is, because what a shop decides not to sell usually tells you more than what it does.

We say no to most of what we see

Every product on this site was assessed one at a time. Not imported from a feed, not bulk-listed out of a supplier catalogue. A person looked at each one and made a call.

The things that get turned down are pretty consistent:

• Hardware with a visible casting seam, or a D-ring held on by a single line of stitching.
• Beds with covers that do not come off, which is the one feature deciding whether a bed lasts a year or five.
• Anything where the photographs and the actual specification tell different stories.
• Near-identical duplicates. If two items are the same product in a different box, one of them goes.
• Anything we could not describe accurately. If we cannot say what it is made of, we are not going to have a guess on a product page.

Why a smaller range is better for you

A pet shop with forty thousand products has not evaluated forty thousand products. It has connected a feed. The work of deciding what is any good has been quietly handed to you, and you do it by reading reviews of things nobody at the shop has ever held.

A tighter range means the filtering already happened. It also means that when you filter our collars by material or size, what comes back is a real set of options rather than fifty versions of the same collar.

What we are not claiming

We are not a workshop. We do not cut, stitch or finish anything ourselves, and the range is made by a manufacturing partner overseas rather than in small artisan batches by candlelight.

So "small batch" is not our claim. "Small range, heavily filtered" is, and it is the honest version of the same idea. What we add is judgement and accurate description, not manufacturing.

How the range grows

Slowly, and in response to gaps rather than trends. The gaps we know about right now are breakaway cat collars, ceramic bowls and a proper grooming range. They are on the list because customers keep asking, not because they would tidy up a category page.

When something new turns up here, it has been through exactly the same assessment as everything else.

Common questions

Why do you not sell bowls or grooming products? Because we have not yet found ones we would use ourselves. The categories sit in the navigation so you can see the gap rather than wonder whether we hid it.

Will you restock something that sells out? Usually, if it was good. Occasionally something goes and does not come back, because the replacement available to us was worse.

Do you sell the same products as other stores? Some of the range is available elsewhere, which is true of nearly every pet shop that is not also a factory. What differs is which items we chose, how accurately they are described, and whether the photograph shows the actual product.