A dog owner, who quit a career in finance to start her own firm making pet treats, is now reaping the rewards of a thriving business…in fact, she’s living the Life of Riley.

Sarah Meredith started her company four years ago, making the treats in her home kitchen after discovering her dog Riley was intolerant to many foods.

As the company grew, she moved manufacture into an outbuilding before taking on much larger premises on a business park in Market Drayton, Shropshire.

The aptly-named business, Life of Riley, now has its own pop-up shop on the premises and the range of products are flying off the shelves.

Pet Trade Xtra managed to grab a few minutes of the busy entrepreneur’s time to find out more about the Life of Riley.

How did you come up with the ingredients and recipes for your treats in the first instance?

We realised there was a shortage of grain free non-meat/diary-based treats. Riley was allergic to pork, beef, rabbit and some fish, and to try and distinguish what was in the treats was often quite difficult, so we decided to negate animal proteins completely and use hypoallergenic, grain free, natural and nutritionally beneficial ingredients – this helped us narrow down what ingredients we should use.

What gave you the confidence to attempt to sell the treats?

Research, research, and more research. We also had help from vets and nutritionists to develop the recipes. Feedback was also crucial – we tested our treats on dogs with sensitive tummies and their owners reported back to us.

When did you move out of your home kitchen into a commercial unit?

We started off by converting an old stone outhouse in our garden into a dedicated bakery. We found this was the safest way. Many human foods are not safe for dogs and the risk of cross contamination from using my own kitchen seemed to defeat the whole point of what we were trying to achieve – to provide a safe, reliable product dogs could enjoy without any concerns of upset. We don’t advertise, we rely on word of mouth and our social media to promote ourselves – it takes a little longer that way but with this we have grown nice and steadily into the business we are today, developing as we go along with feedback from our customers. We try to offer a natural alternative to all the novelty type options out there as well as providing the everyday treats. Towards the end of last year we decided that it was time to take the plunge. We found two brilliant commercial units for let, we converted them into a full scale production unit and moved in, in March this year – we have more than 20 times the space that we did, but we seem to be outgrowing this fast too!

Where and how did you start selling the treats?

We started with our own website, but it soon became clear we were much more passionate about providing a great service to our stockists – we are now 90% wholesale/trade and we love it that way – they get just as excited as us when we launch new products and many of them help us come up with ideas and pass on valuable customer feedback. We have a great retention rate and many of them have been with us since the start. We started with a few local stockists but we have now spread from the furthest points of the Scottish Isles, down to Cornwall.

Which retail outlets sell your products?

Pet stores, zero waste shops, garden centres, subscription services, dog groomers, dog friendly holiday accommodation and café’s, but we also have some weird and wonderful ones too!

Do you sell much online?

We do indeed, our wholesalers have special access to our trade prices on our website so it’s very busy on our website. We decided to ditch the old order form and invoice method years ago as it caused too much work for everyone so we have a live system now.

Tell us about your pop-up store.

Since we have moved to our commercial unit, we made our office into a show room to showcase our range when we had meetings. Funnily enough we had that many members of the general public come in and ask to buy things, we felt bad about turning them away all the time. So to keep everyone happy and to receive direct feedback from our customers we decided to open a pop-up shop on Thursdays! It’s fab as we get to meet our doggy customers this way too!

What’s the ultimate ambition for the business?

Oh that’s a tricky question, it’s my passion, it’s what gets me up in the morning so who knows what may happen! At the moment we are really enjoying developing all the ideas we have had over the years and bringing them to market – watch this space!

For more information visit www.lifeofrileyuk.com