Good stuff for good animals, since 2014
Margot Ellison opened Paws & Whiskers in spring 2014 after spending three years as a buyer for a mid-sized veterinary supply chain. The job taught her a lot about margins and very little about animals. She kept noticing that the products with the best packaging were often the ones with the worst ingredient lists, and the brands that actually worked were the ones nobody had heard of. When the lease on a small corner unit came up near her flat, she took it. The first week of trading, she sold mostly to neighbours and one very enthusiastic woman with four rabbits.
The shop grew slowly and on purpose. Margot added a delivery route in 2017 after a customer with a mobility issue asked if she could drop off a bag of food on her way home. That one favour turned into a Tuesday-Saturday route covering most of the surrounding streets. The subscription box service came in 2020, during the first lockdown, when she realised a lot of her regulars couldn't get out and the big online retailers were running weeks behind. She packed boxes on the kitchen table for the first three months before the back room was cleared out and turned into a proper packing station.
These days the shop stocks around 400 individual products across dogs, cats, small animals, and birds. Margot still reads every new supplier's ingredient list before agreeing to s…
Margot Ellison opened Paws & Whiskers in 2014 after three years as a buyer for a veterinary supply chain, where she grew frustrated with the gap between product marketing and actual ingredient quality. Before that she worked briefly as a veterinary receptionist, which is where she first started paying attention to what animals were actually eating. She trained informally under a veterinary nutritionist for three years before the shop opened and still handles all new supplier vetting herself. Outside the shop she keeps two dogs, a lurcher named Pip and a very old beagle named Clive, and she grows most of her own vegetables. She is not on social media but she does reply to every email.