Zero investors, nine products, €1.3 million in sales: how Animal Instinct grew

Roberto Caballero - ADV Strategist & Growth Marketing Manager — Published on 17 July 2026 - Updated on 13 September 2026

The three partners of Animal Instinct, Roberto, Sveva and Laura, with Stark, Dracarys and Arya in the warehouse on the day of the first million in revenue.

Let's start with a clarification, because it's the first thing people ask me: €1.3 million is the total sales from 15 February 2022 to today, across 20,186 orders and with a 2.3% conversion rate. Not one year.

I'm writing it right away because online you constantly read inflated numbers, and I don't want ours to look like one of those. We didn't turn over €1.3 million in twelve months: we got there in four and a half years, adding up every single order since we opened.

And if someone had told me that on 15 February, I would have told them they were out of their mind.

Really.

When we started, my goal was much smaller. I thought: "If someday we could turn over €40,000 a year, that would already be a huge accomplishment."

Because Animal Instinct wasn't born backed by investors. It wasn't born in an office. It wasn't born with a perfect business plan. It was born in Sveva's bedroom. Three people. Three partners.

Me, Sveva and Laura.

Each with completely different skills, but with the same desire to build something of our own. Even today I think that's exactly what made the difference.

Today €40,000 is what we make in a month.

I was in charge of marketing, advertising and strategy. Every euro invested had to make sense. Over these years we have invested over €170,000 across Meta Ads, Google Ads and Pinterest. This wasn't money spent "hoping" something would work. Behind every campaign were tests, analysis, mistakes, late nights in front of reports and constant optimizations.

Laura, on the other hand, was the person who turned all of that into an experience for the customer. The website, the newsletters, the purchase flows, the e-commerce organization... everything the customer saw when they entered Animal Instinct also carried her signature.

Total sales €1.3M — the real numbers from the Animal Instinct dashboard.

And then there was Sveva. If Animal Instinct has a recognizable identity today, it's partly thanks to her. From product development to packaging, from research to the creative side, she was always the person who could turn an idea into something real.

None of us could have done all this alone. And it's something I often repeat to my clients today. Companies don't grow through a single person. They grow when different people bring together different skills and start trusting each other.

Then, of course, there were three other team members. The ones who didn't attend meetings, didn't look at dashboards and didn't even know what a Meta Ads campaign was: Stark, Dracarys and Arya, our three four-legged collaborators.

They grew up alongside the company. They were there when we prepared the first orders, when the first sales came in, and even when things weren't going as we hoped. After all, Animal Instinct was born precisely for them, and I think that's one of the most beautiful things about our journey.

We started with nine products

Nine. All chews. Not nine categories, not nine lines: nine references, a single type of product. That was everything we had. Today we have over seventy-five. I mention it because it's the advice I give most often to anyone about to open an e-commerce who asks me how many products you need to start. The answer almost everyone expects is forty, fifty, a catalog that looks serious. The right answer is ten. With ten products you quickly understand which one sells and which one sits still. With forty you've spent four times as much on stock, your money is locked up on shelves that don't turn, and it takes you months to figure out where your real product is. The catalog is built afterwards, on top of what actually works. We reached seventy-five products because we started from nine, not in spite of it.

The growth wasn't an explosion. It was a climb.

There's one thing you never see in e-commerce stories told online: real growth is slow. We didn't wake up one morning with our revenue tripled. Animal Instinct grew between 38% and 45% a year, every year, from 2022 to today. It sounds small put like that. But it's exactly the reason it still exists today, and those cumulative €1.3 million are the sum of those climbs, one on top of the other. And there's one thing that still surprises me when I think about it: we never took a single euro from anyone. No investor, no funding partner, no round. Every euro invested in advertising, in stock, in packaging came out of what the company had already earned. For an e-commerce to reach these numbers starting like this is not the norm: the norm is to take capital, grow fast and often close just as fast. Whoever grows 300% in a year has usually burned someone else's money, or run out of stock halfway through the season, or ends up with angry customers and reviews they'll carry around for years. We couldn't afford that, because there were no investors to cover the mistakes. There was the three of us.

The week we sold everything

And then it happened anyway. We wanted to try WhatsApp marketing. We had never done it, it was a test. We prepared a dedicated discount, reserved only for our customers, and sent it to 80% of the database. It worked. It worked too well. We sold practically everything we had in stock in a very short time. Few pieces were left. And at that point the real problem arrived: the suppliers couldn't deliver the goods on time. We were left almost a week without products. A week with an e-commerce open and nothing to sell. That week taught me more than any campaign that went well. The mistake wasn't running the campaign. The mistake was sending it to 80% of the customers all at once, without asking ourselves first what would happen if it actually worked. We had calculated the risk of it going badly. We hadn't calculated the risk of it going extremely well. And that's where the difficulty that no one talks about when they talk about growth lies: growing fast means asking your suppliers to grow at your same speed. And they have their own timelines, their own batches, their own productions. Your campaign can run in three hours. A restocking can't. Since then, before every important promotion, the first question is no longer how much we'll sell. It's how much we can deliver.

Today many people only see one number: €1.3 million. I, when I look at that number, see a bedroom. Nine chews. Three partners who decided to risk what they had. A week with empty shelves. Thousands of mistakes that taught us something. And so many people who believed in us when there was still no reason to.

Stark, Dracarys and Arya: Animal Instinct's three four-legged collaborators.

Frequently asked questions

And it's precisely because of this journey that today, with Bau Pet Strategy, we can help other brands in the pet sector. Not because we read a book on marketing, but because we built an e-commerce from scratch, grew it, made mistakes, learned and achieved concrete results.

When a client asks me how long it takes, I don't answer with a theory. I answer with four and a half years of my life.