Tails: The Bahraini Pet Food Brand

“Tails” is the regions first all natural pet food brand that has been officially launched in February 2012.  Their aim was to provide healthy pet food that is free of preservatives, added colors and flavors as well as the use of 100 percent natural human grade ingredients. They club their services with the Highest Quality, the Best Customer Experience and Value for Money.

Being the first of its kind in the region, and with the general lack of data availability, i immediately thought ” How did they know that this was going to be successful?”

Leap of Faith 

i was fortunate to meet with the owners, in class we talked about all the different forecasting techniques and determined when it was best to use each technique. But what do you do if you had no history/data to use?

Well in this particular case there was no entity in Bahrain that actually registers or even keeps track of Dogs in Bahrain. The owners did alot of research and found that the only entity closest to giving them information was the airport customs office, and they only recorded how many dogs came into Bahrain and how many dogs went out. Moreover they started to get samples and estimates from vets. And the final number they came up with somehow met their expectations and they were comfortable with getting even 10% of it.

Capacity Issue

Within a four month span, sales at Tails has doubled . This led to a bottle neck in their production ( remember the paper puppet activity?) , the machines they had were not able to package and seal fast enough to meet the demand of their customers.  They tried to overcome it by cooking more on and storing it  but they did not have enough storage capacity to meet this unanticipated demand. to overcome this Tails had to quickly invest in new machines that will be able to seal and package faster in order to meet the demand of their customers, gives more flexibility on variety and size, and to start distribution to supermarkets.

Tails are slowly keeping up with their demand however it has been stressful for them because they were not able to accurately forecast.

So i leave you with a thought : how do you forecast with no data? and which forecasting method should Tails use today in order to help them predict their future sales?

 

For more information please visit www.tails.co to get your free dog food sample today!