A Safe Pet Care and Hygiene Brand Formulated With Love from One Pet Parent to Another
Creature Companion Magazine had an opportunity to touch base with Mr. Mohit Lalvani, Founder of Captain Zack. He dwelled upon the inception of his venture, his strategies, USPs, and social welfare initiatives. Excerpts…
Hailing from personal care industry, what inspired you to step into the pet industry and start with your own pet grooming product line?
I have always been an animal lover. Since my childhood, I have rescued more than 100 dogs and cats. As an avid animal lover, having a pet was natural.
When my current pet Zack was 6 years old, my wife Mumtaz mentioned he had a lot of itching. Back then, I never really paid attention to the products being used for him or even how he was groomed. Since I had a background in formulations and ingredients, Mumtaz seeded the thought of making something for Zack. It was that seed that helped grow this beautiful plant – my brand Captain Zack.
It was even named Zack because I actually made my first shampoo for him; when I saw him relieved from his itching, I thought to myself, why don’t I expand these shampoos for other pets too. During my research, I realized the quality of shampoos we had in India back then were not up to the mark. There were no regulations on pet care products by the government, you could make anything and sell it for pets. Looking at this gap, I visioned to build a brand that would help all pet parents to provide the best care for their pets and in turn increase their pet’s life as well.
Captain Zack is one of the brands that created a space in pet grooming products where the market was largely dominated by foreign brands. What did you do differently?
My vision was clear – Providing the best and safest products for pets. In the quest to do that, we made sure we used the best quality ingredients, no colours, no synthetic chemicals, no artificial fragrance, or harmful ingredients are used in the formulation of Captain Zack.
Despite no regulations by the government, we followed all the mandates any human grooming brand would follow. We have an Ayurvedic Veterinary license for our products; we have disclosed each ingredient we use to formulate.
We built a brand that has a story a real-life pet parent can connect with. Our brand solves the problems all pet parents face with lots of love.
I personally speak to pet parents and believe that has also helped in building credibility to our brand. Our team’s focus has been on customers first and doing everything a pet parent would desire.
We have even clinically tested our products to ensure their safety.
These have proven to build the brand and expand the category.
Shed some light upon the idea behind Captain Zack’s one of its kind initiative – ‘Captain Zack’s University of Barkley’.
With the first lockdown in 2020, we got a lot of time to think and build our strategy. We saw people distressed and we wanted to ease them out. They had no access to vets or pet shops; even online e-commerce platforms were not able to deliver essentials. Having a pet home is not easy. From grooming them to feeding to making sure they are healthy were concerns pet parents had. They asked Captain Zack for solutions to these issues they were facing. We have a free ‘Talk to a Vet’ service and we made sure each and every query was answered.
While current pet parents were being answered, there were a lot of new pet parents (especially those who adopted pets during the lockdown) who were confused about pet parenting. To fill this gap, we started our own pet parenting community – Captain Zack’s University Of Barkley (a pun on the university Berkley). The platform is built to educate and answer all queries of pet parents related to pet parenting. We have a faculty and advisory board too on the platform who help us answer queries of pet parents. We have tried to bring together experts from all domains (behaviour, nutrition, grooming, training, vet, remedies, social, etc.), who help us answer queries of pet parents. We put out informative content in form of blogs, posts, and videos from them.
Plus, as a part of the Captain Zack’s University Of Barkley, pet parents enjoy a lot of benefits on Captain Zack products, webinars, access to our faculty, and so on.
Tell us about your recent collaboration with Mon Ami Foundation. What is the vision behind this association?
Captain Zack envisions in providing the safest care for your pets while giving back to society. Taking a step towards this vision, we have collaborated with Mon Ami Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit Trust which is committed to empower migrant women by helping them become financially independent through their skill-building efforts.
Supporting this cause of Mon Ami, we have introduced a one-of-its-kind crochet toy that are handmade by migrant women under Mon Ami’s Skill-Building project. These women are trained to build the skill of crochet and then eligible to earn daily wages for making toys.
Apart from being colourful, durable, and fun, these crochet toys are extremely safe for your pet and for the environment as they are made with high-quality yarn and zero plastic.
Our attempt is not only to empower these women but also to bring to you a unique toy for your pooches’ fun-time.
For every toy a pet parent buys, we can help one woman earn her wage and become financially independent. We have been able to help over 300 migrant women from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, & Jharkhand, and collectively they have earned 1.5 lacs from our order.
Captain Zack is soon going to launch its pet food range. Tell us more about your future endeavours.
At Captain Zack, we aim to provide best products to give pets a healthy and long life. In order to achieve that, we do plan to expand into categories over and above grooming. We have already launched natural, healthy, and nutritious treats earlier this year. The response to these treats has been amazing. In fact, Zack loves the treats too. We have also recently launched our own set of crochet toys and we will soon be getting into the foods category as well.
