From handcrafted partyware to science-backed pet supplements, few firms look less alike than Meri Meri and PetLab Co. Yet they share a single, telling decision that has transformed how they work: both built their next phase of growth on Oracle NetSuite.
In separate conversations, Meri Meri’s managing director, Paul Cripps, and PetLab Co.’s chief financial officer, Tony Morreale, described, in unvarnished terms, what happens when a high-growth company ditches a patchwork of systems for a cloud ERP that acts as the business’s command centre.
Cripps arrived at Meri Meri—a San Francisco-registered, UK-run design house whose seasonal launches light up kitchen tables from London to Reno—mid-pandemic. He found a company with enviable creativity and a back office straining at the seams. Shopify, Amazon, B2B portals and a constellation of 3PLs all fed a heavily customised legacy ERP. The plumbing never quite held. Reports froze. Orders jammed in queues. “Every day there was an issue,” he says. “If a report ran, people made coffee while it locked up.” Decision-making slowed to the speed of a spinning progress wheel. In a global business that designs Christmas two years out and ships to two continents, uncertainty is more than an annoyance; it is drag.
Meri Meri faced a familiar crossroads: pay handsomely to re-implement an ageing system already papered over with one-off fixes, or start again with something built for best practice in the cloud. Cripps had implemented ERPs before. This time, NetSuite’s appeal was less about bells and whistles than about discipline. “Don’t try to make NetSuite fit your business—change your processes to match best practice,” he says. The company adopted OneWorld to reconcile a UK-led, US-registered structure and kept customisation to a minimum. The implementation took two and a half years in calendar terms, not because of complexity but because the company only had one safe cutover window—April to June—each year. A sandbox went up quickly; teams prodded, tested and suggested changes; and when the switch was finally thrown mid-May, something unusual happened: the noise stopped.
What changed first was the rhythm of the day. Under the old set-up, the Reno distribution centre opened before dawn and then waited for someone, somewhere, to release orders. Under NetSuite, Shopify purchases appeared in the ERP within about half a minute, hit the DC pick list moments later and were being packed inside five minutes. The pendulum swung from frustration to speed so quickly that customers began emailing ten minutes after checkout asking to amend orders already sealed in boxes. Cripps’s measure of success was delightfully un-technical. “By the end of June, it was almost like we’d never been without it,” he says. The floor went quiet. Exceptions evaporated. Customer service tickets, once counted in the hundreds each week, fell to a handful of genuine user mistakes. Overtime all but disappeared. The team that had been firefighting became, once again, a team.
The financial consequences are easy to miss because they creep in through absence: no overtime, no backfills, no morning queues, no costly consultants to unpick brittle integrations. Meri Meri’s headcount drifted down from the mid-nineties to around eighty through natural attrition, even as revenue climbed by more than a fifth. Finance shrank without drama; the warehouse moved from two shifts to one and a half. Against the cost of a modern cloud ERP, those avoided hires alone turn into a six-figure annual saving—before you count the opportunity value of moving faster.
If Meri Meri’s story is one of a creative manufacturer rediscovering flow, PetLab Co. offers the CFO’s view of a scale-up growing from start-up reflexes into institutional reliability. The London-founded, US-focused pet wellness brand launched in 2018 and rode a wave of direct-to-consumer demand. When Morreale arrived, the finance stack—perfectly reasonable for an early-stage business—had become a brake. Month-end stretched to four weeks. Multi-entity consolidation was clumsy. Inventory insight at SKU level was elusive. “I’ve implemented NetSuite three times,” he says. “For a business a couple of years into its journey, it’s the right breadth at the right price.”
PetLab’s implementation in 2021 coincided with a professionalising of its operating cadence. NetSuite automated bank reconciliations, turned month-end into a matter of days and finally delivered the granularity to answer the questions a scaled consumer brand must answer: which SKUs make money, in which channels, and how does that change with tariffs, packaging costs and shifting fulfilment footprints? The company mapped its five US warehouses directly in NetSuite, reconciled physical stock against system positions and moved beyond “never stock out” as a mantra to something more useful: never be surprised. When US-China packaging costs bit, the team modelled the SKU-level impact and shifted to Vietnam, tracking margin effects from the general ledger to the pallet.
The knock-on effects are cultural as much as financial. Morreale’s team of eleven has not grown, even as revenue surged from around $70 million to well north of $200 million. Automation has not hollowed out the department; it has lifted it. The repetitive is handled by machines; people move up the value chain. That, in turn, changes how outsiders see the company. In the 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 advisers described the numbers as “robust”. It is a small phrase that carries weight. Investors fund what they can trust. Trust starts with auditable, real-time data.
Both leaders are practical about artificial intelligence. Neither is chasing chatty front-ends for their own sake. At Meri Meri, AI already sits inside demand-planning via Netstock and will increasingly draft customer-service replies and surface cross-regional trends—California versus Florida, north-south seasonality, the subtle ways Halloween plays differently in the UK and US—so humans can spend their time on judgement, not retrieval. “AI won’t design our products,” Cripps says. “But it will buy back hours across the business. If you don’t embrace it, you’ll be left behind.” At PetLab, the lure is scenario planning that actually fits how a finance team works, with natural-language prompts and explainable outputs; until then, NetSuite’s core gets them most of the way.
In the end, the case for NetSuite here is not framed in the glossy language of digital transformation. It is disarmingly plain. If your warehouse waits for the system rather than the system serving the warehouse; if month-end bleeds into a third or fourth week; if customer service has become an exceptions desk; if you cannot answer a SKU-level margin question in the time it takes to walk to a meeting, you are not simply inefficient—you are throttling your ability to grow. What Cripps and Morreale reveal, each from different industries and instincts, is that a modern ERP is less a software purchase than a managerial choice. It is a decision to run on standard processes, to measure silence as a KPI, and to treat reliable numbers as a strategic asset.
“By the end of the first six weeks, it was like we’d never been without it,” says Cripps. Morreale offers the CFO’s version: same team, roughly triple the revenue, with banks and buyers leaning in rather than looking away. For ambitious businesses wondering whether the ceiling they feel is real, the lesson is simple. A stitched-together stack adds people to chase problems. A single cloud backbone compounds growth—with confidence.
