Whisker, the maker of self-cleaning litter boxes, is looking to make more “cat people” with a new marketing push around its Litter-Robot brand. The 25-year-old company’s marketing, which to date has largely been focused around elimintating the chore of scooping cat poop, is undergoing a transformation as it attempts to blur the line between being a tech company and a pet company.
The evolution follows the company hiring its first CMO last fall: Hew Loyd, who previously served as the CMO of CookUnity and Sir Kensington’s. Loyd is currently overseeing the launch of a new brand initiative, “The Future is Feline.” The effort seeks to position cats as the ideal companion and promotes the Whisker’s app and Whisker+ subscription service, which unlocks a new range of features to users of select Litter-Robot products.
Whisker has also been adding new models to reach a broader consumer base, including the Litter-Robot 5 and 5 Pro, which use artificial intelligence and a camera for more insights on an owner’s pet. The Litter-Robot EVO is a more compact version geared toward those living in apartments and smaller spaces.
These moves come as cat ownership has been on the rise, increasing 23% in 2024 and reaching 49 million households, creating opportunities for the company to establish a relationship with a new wave of customers.
Marketing Dive spoke with Loyd to discuss his first couple months at the company, its newest marketing effort and the future of pet ownership.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: What were some of the changes you made when stepping into the CMO role?
HEW LOYD: There's fantastic foundations here. What is most exciting, and why I was drawn to this role, Whisker has been around for 25 years, so it's certainly not a “startup,” but it's seen an incredible acceleration over the past eight to 10 years, and I think that's been due to many factors. But our CEO has really led a new wave of growth in the business, which has been really exciting.
I think we have incredible opportunities given what is going on in the broader space right now, from a performance perspective. The big opportunity right now is driving a brand that really leads with an incredible story to leverage the power of their product and their audience. And I feel like Whisker has done a fantastic job of that. It's just now time to take that to the next level.
Right off the bat, one area that needed more work was creating at the highest level, the next layer of purpose as a platform. So we have an initiative called “The Future is Feline.” We also have built multitouch attribution, so we are getting a lot sharper in terms of our measurements, really understanding incrementality in this business and really sharpening up our unit economics.
The last area, which is not new or revolutionary for us, is to build an incredibly robust ad production system. We call it Sprints, and it really is our commitment to sectioning off a group of finely tuned creatives to work on volume and velocity for the voracious beast that is the paid social engine. How do we do a better job of not only building connections to the consumer, but doing that at scale? We've really leaned into that as well.
This is your first role at a pet brand. Do you see Whisker as a pet product company because you sell litter, mats, odor control, other pet supplies, or do you see it as more of a tech company? Is it more of an Apple or a Friskies?
To this day, our business is still primarily selling Litter-Robots, and that is a connected device. That connected device is very much a tech product. You can think about this business the way you might think about other connected home product devices in your life, such as Peloton, that kind of thing. How this business has leveraged an app experience as well as the functional use of the hardware, for me, means it sits very nicely within a series of products that work much in the same way. And that probably sets us in a different aisle than maybe classic pet products, or pet food, or other things that fall maybe a little bit more into that typical CPG space.
How are you getting consumers to make the jump from a traditional litter box, which costs typically just a few dollars, to a brand whose individual items can go for $599 or more while product bundles can top $1,000?
I think the challenge for a company like ours is, ultimately, we have to completely change the world view of customers. There are, of course, really inexpensive versions that are accessible to all. And we love that there are solutions accessible to all, so that more people can adopt cats. But we also know that there are many places in our life where there is a simple, cheap or totally free version, and we opt for something that is more advanced because it offers so many more benefits. We believe that we have improved the experience of scooping poop on a daily basis 10 times over if not 100 times over.
We want a world where more people want cats. And we think one of the highest levels of friction is the litter box, not only in the chore itself, but also the odor and the time. It gives people an opportunity to recalibrate the relationship with this family member that needs our assistance in that way. So we feel very comfortable with that.
Pet waste can be a taboo topic. How does Litter-Robot approach that in its marketing?
I've just been attracted to categories where we can take something mundane or possibly even taboo and we can reapproach that and really remove the layer of shame and give people community and openness. We think there's liberation in talking about it, and we think, of course, there's a lot of humor. Who doesn't like a poop joke? This brand has leaned into that in the past.
We've grown up and grown that message a little bit more over time. “The Future is Feline” is really built around this idea that we believe cats are the superior companion, and while we live in a dog biased society, Litter-Robot enables your relationship with your cat to just be that much more streamlined, and therefore that lowers the bar for more people to come in and adopt a cat.
Part of the argument that cats are an incredible option, is that with Litter-Robot we remove poop entirely as a concept. When you have a dog, poop is very much a part of your life. And there's no Litter-Robot coming to save you.
Given the build and price point of the Litter-Robot, consumers typically have one for years. Once the company hits market saturation, how important is the tech side of the business for growth?
That's entirely where we're going as a business. Whisker+ and just the broader, connected nature of where the hardware meets software in doing a better job at diagnosing the challenges that cat owners have. We tell you the things about your cat that you don’t know. We would like to think through this portal that is the Litter-Robot, cats walk into an environment where they get a little bit of a check in. It has a scale on it. It's monitoring the cat at just the most basic level. But with Litter-Robot 5 and 5 Pro, we have cat face identification for multicat households.
What does it look like if your cat is getting in and out of a litter box 10-15 times a day? It's a UTI, and that can be dangerous. And outside of having a Litter-Robot, if you have a traditional litter box, you are probably at work, and you would never know. I wouldn't call it a diagnostic tool, but the heart of where we're going is really just giving a more crisp and more advanced view for cat owners on a daily basis.
There are 49 million cat households, and out of those, there are probably something like 3 million automatic litter box households. So if you look at the gap between 3 million automatic litter box households and 49 million cat households, that gives you a sense of what we're working to do, which is there are a lot of cat owners without this solution. We will be doing this for a very long time.
“Future is Feline” is really meant to identify this challenge, which is that there's a lot of bias in our society against cats. And people have closed off their view of getting a cat because of some of these challenges that we are fixing. With that, we expect to push that 49 million cat households up.
