Antelope, an omnichannel, pet consumer platform focuses on delivering high-quality, natural pet products. Their mission is to build a next-generation conglomerate of excellent pet brands. Antelope seeks to become the next P&G or Honest company for pets, and plans to grow the business by acquiring and scaling suitable pet brands.

Antelope acquired Doggo, a past thoughtbot client, to add pet health insurance and training options as part of the brand family. Doggo’s pet insurance offering has become a vital part of the pet industry. Only 2% of U.S. pet owners carry insurance for their pets. However, the market has experienced rapid growth as COVID pet adopters are increasingly considering and purchasing pet insurance. The need for a user-friendly insurance platform like Doggo for pet owners drove an annual increase of 25% in 2021 and was a strategic acquisition for Antelope. (Source: Businesswire.com). 

Antelope will enable Doggo to expand their direct-to-consumer strategy by providing more robust marketing, branding, and subscriber growth. 

For the Antelope team to move the Doggo brand into their portfolio and move forward with larger marketing efforts, they needed to complete necessary changes to the existing website. High-priority updates included copy and imagery changes, restructuring a few key pages to improve usability, and adding new navigation elements.

To improve overall maintainability and provide greater control to tackle further changes, Antelope was looking for a technology partner with a background in the existing site plus product strategy expertise to best inform the path forward. The Antelope team wanted to make a single investment that would allow them to complete the needed website updates and provide further control to their non-technical management team. With no in-house team or plans to hire, they were unsure about their options and approached thoughtbot seeking support.

After reviewing the prioritized updates for both short-term and long-term goals, thoughtbot spent time digging into the roles and responsibilities of the Antelope team who would be responsible for the site moving forward. With clarity on their skillset and workflows, thoughtbot advised Antelope to implement a headless CMS. The CMS would provide an easy-to-use admin for future updates so Antelope wasn’t reliant on a developer to support changes. A CMS would also help ensure changes or new additions adhered to the approved brand standards and a series of reusable page layouts and block types would maintain the overall site design. 

With the choice to move forward with Contentful, thoughtbot set up the data structure that would integrate with the current backend (Rails application) and populate the reusable blocks to be used in building website pages. The brand guidelines were implemented in the form of a style guide and the site layout began to take shape, including the navigation structure.

As block types were completed, pages were recreated with copy, layout, and image updates made in parallel. The block types would allow more custom pages to be made down the line and provide a great deal of flexibility and autonomy to the Antelope team.

The thoughtbot + Antelope team maintained strong communication throughout the project and used standing meetings and asynchronous channels to clarify priorities and share feedback in a timely manner. This allowed the team to get a lot done collectively during our time together. 

In our final weeks, thoughtbot facilitated training sessions for the Antelope team and documented the Contentful workflow for future team members. The new site was launched on time and on budget in less than 6 weeks and the Antelope team was a pleasure to work with.