From handcrafted party goods to science-backed pet supplements, few companies are less similar than Meri Meri and PetLab Co. Yet they have a single, meaningful decision that has changed the way they work: Both have built their next phase of growth on Oracle NetSuite.
In separate conversations, Meri Meri CEO Paul Cripps and PetLab Co. CFO Tony Morreale described in unvarnished terms what happens when a high-growth company replaces a patchwork of systems with a cloud ERP that acts as the company’s command center.
Cripps arrived mid-pandemic at Meri Meri — a San Francisco-registered, U.K.-run design house whose seasonal launches light up kitchen tables from London to Reno. He found a company with enviable creativity and a back office that was bursting at the seams. Shopify, Amazon, B2B portals and a constellation of 3PLs have all fed a heavily customized legacy ERP. The lines never held completely. Reports frozen. Orders pile up in queues. “Every day there was a problem,” he says. “When a report was running, people were making coffee while it was wrapping up.” Decision making slowed to the speed of a spinning wheel of progress. In a global company that plans Christmas two years in advance and delivers to two continents, uncertainty is more than a nuisance; it is resistance.
Meri Meri faced a familiar crossroads: either pay handsomely to re-implement an outdated system that was already overloaded with one-off fixes, or start over with something designed for best practices in the cloud. Cripps had already implemented ERPs. This time, NetSuite’s appeal was less about the bells and whistles and more about the discipline. “Don’t try to adapt NetSuite to your business – change your processes to align with best practices,” he says. The company introduced OneWorld to balance a UK-led and US-registered structure and keep customization to a minimum. The implementation took two and a half years calendar-wise, not because of the complexity, but because the company only had one safe transition window – April to June – each year. A sandpit quickly emerged; Teams drove, tested and proposed changes; And when the switch was finally flipped in mid-May, something unusual happened: the noise stopped.
What changed first was the rhythm of the day. Under the old system, the distribution center in Reno opened before dawn and then waited for someone somewhere to place orders. On NetSuite, Shopify purchases appeared in the ERP in about half a minute, landed on the DC shortlist moments later, and were packaged within five minutes. The pendulum swung from frustration to speed so quickly that within 10 minutes of checking out, customers started sending emails asking to change orders that were already sealed in boxes. Cripps’ measure of success was pleasingly untechnical. “At the end of June it was almost as if we had never been without it,” he says. The ground became still. Exceptions disappeared. Customer service tickets, numbering in the hundreds each week, were due to a handful of genuine user errors. Overtime has all but disappeared. The team that had been fighting the fire became a team again.
The financial consequences are easy to overlook because they creep in through absenteeism: no overtime, no refills, no morning queues, no costly consultants to resolve fragile integrations. Due to natural fluctuation, the number of employees at Meri Meri fell to around eighty in the mid-1990s, although sales increased by more than a fifth. Finances shrunk without drama; The warehouse was changed from two to one and a half shifts. Compared to the costs of a modern cloud ERP, the avoided new hires alone result in six-figure annual savings – without taking into account the opportunity value of a faster changeover.
While Meri Meri’s story is one of a creative manufacturer rediscovering flow, PetLab Co. offers the CFO’s perspective on a scale-up evolving from start-up reflexes to institutional reliability. The London-based, US-focused pet wellness brand launched in 2018 and saw a wave of direct-to-consumer demand. By the time Morreale arrived, the financial resources – entirely adequate for an early-stage company – had become a drag. End of month extended to four weeks. Consolidating multiple companies was clumsy. Insights into inventory at the SKU level were difficult to gain. “I implemented NetSuite three times,” he says. “For a company that has been around for a few years, it offers the right breadth at the right price.”
PetLab’s implementation in 2021 coincided with a professionalization of its operations. NetSuite automated bank reconciliations, turned month-end into a matter of days, and ultimately provided the granularity to answer the questions a scaled consumer brand needs to answer: Which SKUs make money, in which channels, and how does that change with rates, packaging costs, and changing fulfillment footprints? The company mapped its five U.S. warehouses directly into NetSuite, matching physical inventory with system positions and moving beyond the “never sell out” mantra to something more useful: Never be surprised. As packaging costs fell between the US and China, the team modeled the impact at the SKU level and shifted to Vietnam to track margin effects from the general ledger to the pallet.
The consequences are both cultural and financial. Morreale’s 11-person team hasn’t grown, even though revenue has increased from around $70 million to well over $200 million. Automation hasn’t hollowed out the department; it raised it. The repetition is done by machines; People move up the value chain. This in turn changes the way outsiders view the company. During the crisis years, PetLab built its credibility with HSBC by sharing NetSuite-derived forecasts every two weeks. When private equity took over in 2025, due diligence consultants described the numbers as “solid.” It’s a small sentence that carries weight. Investors finance what they can trust. Trust starts with real-time, verifiable data.
Both leaders have a practical approach to artificial intelligence. It’s also not about chasing chatty front ends for their own sake. At Meri Meri, AI is already integrated into demand planning via Netstock and will increasingly design customer service responses and uncover cross-regional trends – California vs. Florida, north-south seasonality, the subtle differences in Halloween in the UK and US – so people can spend their time judging, not retrieving. “AI will not design our products,” says Cripps. “But it will regain man-hours across the company. If you don’t embrace it, you’ll be left behind.” At PetLab, the appeal is scenario planning that actually fits the way a finance team works, with natural language prompts and explainable results; Until then, the NetSuite core will do most of the work.
Ultimately, the argument for NetSuite here is not presented in the glossy language of digital transformation. It’s disarmingly clear. If your warehouse is waiting for the system and not the system that serves the warehouse; when the end of the month moves into a third or fourth week; when customer service has become an exception; If you can’t answer a SKU-level margin question in the time it takes to get to a meeting, you’re not simply inefficient – you’re throttling your growth opportunities. What Cripps and Morreale, both from different industries and instincts, reveal is that a modern ERP is less a software purchase and more a management decision. It is a decision to rely on standard processes, measure silence as a KPI and treat reliable numbers as a strategic asset.
“At the end of the first six weeks we felt like we had never been without it,” says Cripps. Morreale offers the CFO’s version: same team, about three times the revenue, with banks and buyers watching rather than looking away. For ambitious companies wondering whether what they believe to be the cap is real, the lesson is simple. A merged stack adds people chasing problems. A single cloud backbone drives growth – with confidence.
