From handmade partyware to science-backed pet supplements, few companies look less alike than Meri Meri and PetLab Co. Yet they share the same decision that changed the way they work: Both built their next phase of growth on Oracle NetSuite.
In separate conversations, Paul Cripps, managing director of Meri Meri, and Tony Morreale, chief financial officer of PetLab Co., described in stark terms what happens when a high-growth company abandons a patchwork of systems for cloud ERP that serves as the command center of the business.
Cripps arrived at Meri Meri — a San Francisco-registered, UK-run design house whose seasonal launches brightened kitchen tables from London to Reno amid the pandemic. They found a company with deep creativity and a tough back office. Shopify, Amazon, B2B portals, and a host of 3PLs all provided a highly customized legacy ERP. The plumbing never worked properly. The reports were frozen. Orders got jammed in queues. “Every day was an issue,” he says. “If there's a report going on, people are making coffee at closing time.” The speed of decision making slowed down to the speed of the wheel of progress. In a global business that designs Christmas two years out and ships to two continents, uncertainty is more than an annoyance; This is drag.
Mary Mary faced a familiar crossroads: pay well to reimplement an already old system with one-time fixes, or start over with something built for best practice in the cloud. Cripps was the first to implement ERP. This time, NetSuite's appeal was less about discipline than about bells and whistles. “Don't try to make NetSuite fit your business – change your processes to match best practice,” he says. The company adopted OneWorld to harmonize its UK-led, US-registered structure and keep customization to a minimum. Implementation took two and a half years by calendar, not because of complexity, but because the company only had one safe cutover window each year – April to June. A sandbox went up quickly; Teams prodded, tested, and suggested changes; And when the switch was finally turned off in mid-May, something unusual happened: The noise stopped.
The first thing to change was the rhythm of the day. Under the old system, the Renault distribution center would open before dawn and then wait for someone to arrive to release the order. Under NetSuite, Shopify purchases appear in ERP within about half a minute, arrive in the DC pickup list a few moments later and are packed within five minutes. The pendulum swung from frustration to frustration so quickly that customers started emailing ten minutes after checkout asking for amendments to orders already in boxes. Cripps's measure of success was happily non-technical. “By the end of June, it was almost like we'd never been without it,” he says. The floor became quiet. Exceptions disappeared. Customer service tickets, which once numbered in the hundreds every week, fell due to some genuine user mistakes. Overtime all disappeared. The team that was engaged in extinguishing the fire became a team once again.
The financial consequences are easy to overlook because they emerge through absenteeism: no overtime, no backfills, no morning queues, no expensive consultants to iron out brittle integrations. Mary Mary's number of employees declined by the mid-nineties to about eighty due to natural decline, while revenues increased by more than a fifth. Without the drama the finances shrank; The warehouse went from two shifts to one and a half shifts. Compared to the cost of a modern cloud ERP, those avoided turn into six-figure annual savings alone – even before you calculate the opportunity value of moving faster.
If Mary Mary's story is one of rediscovering the flow of a creative maker, PetLab offers a CFO's perspective on how the company moved from start-up reflexes to institutional credibility. Founded in London, the US-focused pet wellness brand launched in 2018 and rode a wave of direct-to-consumer demand. When Morreale arrived, the pile of finance – which was perfectly reasonable for an early-stage business – had become a brake. The end of the month was extended by four weeks. Multi-unit consolidation was clumsy. Inventory insight at the SKU level was elusive. “I've implemented NetSuite three times,” he says. “For a business a few years into its journey, it's the right breadth at the right price.”
The implementation of PetLab in 2021 coincided with the professionalization of its operational rhythm. NetSuite automated bank reconciliation, turned month-ends into a matter of days and finally provided detailed information to answer the questions a large consumer brand must answer: Which SKUs make money, in which channels, and how does this change with changes in tariffs, packaging costs, and fulfillment footprints? The company mapped its five US warehouses directly into NetSuite, matching physical stock with system conditions and moving from “never out of stock” to something more useful: never be surprised. When US-China packaging costs dropped slightly, the team modeled the SKU-level impact and moved to Vietnam, tracking the margin impact from general ledger to pallet.
Its effects are cultural as well as financial. Morreale's eleven-member team has not grown while revenues have grown from about $70 million to north of $200 million. Automation hasn't hollowed out the department; It has picked it up. Repetition is controlled by machines; People move up the value chain. In turn, the way outsiders view the company changes. In its bootstrapped years, PetLab built credibility with HSBC by sharing NetSuite-derived forecasts fortnightly. When private equity arrived to take a majority stake in 2025, diligence advisors described the numbers as “strong”. It's a little phrase that holds weight. Investors invest money only in things they can trust. Trust starts with auditable, real-time data.
Both the leaders are practical regarding Artificial Intelligence. Nor is pursuing a chatty front-end for its own self-interest. At Meri Meri, AI already sits inside demand-planning via Netstock and will rapidly draft customer-service answers and surface cross-regional trends — California vs. Florida, north-south seasonality, the subtle way Halloween plays out differently in the UK and US — so humans can spend their time on decisions, not retrieval. “AI will not design our products,” says Cripps. “But it will buy back hours across the business. If you don't embrace it, you'll be left behind.” In PetLab, the charm is scenario planning that fits exactly how a finance team works, with natural language prompts and explainable outputs; Until then, the core of NetSuite has mostly got them.
Finally, the case for NetSuite here is not couched in the glossy language of digital transformation. This is disgustingly obvious. If your warehouse waits for the system instead of the system providing service to the warehouse; If bleeding occurs at the end of the month, in the third or fourth week; If customer service has become an exception desk; If you can't answer a SKU-level margin question in the time it takes to walk into a meeting, you're not just inefficient – you're stifling your ability to grow. What Cripps and Morreale reveal, spanning different industries and trends, is that a modern ERP is less a software purchase than a managerial choice. It's a decision to follow standard processes, measure silence as KPIs, and treat reliable numbers as a strategic asset.
“By the end of the first six weeks, it was like we'd never lived without it,” says Cripps. Morreale offers the CFO's version: the same team, nearly tripling revenues, with banks and buyers leaning in instead of looking away. For ambitious businesses wondering whether they think the ceiling is realistic, the lesson is simple. A stitched stack connects people to pursue problems. A single cloud backbone connects growth – with confidence.
