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From artisan party supplies to scientifically-supported pet enhancements, few companies appear as dissimilar as Meri Meri and PetLab Co. Nonetheless, they share a singular, revealing choice that has revolutionized their operations: both have centered their next stage of development on Oracle NetSuite.
In distinct discussions, Meri Meri’s managing director, Paul Cripps, and PetLab Co.’s chief financial officer, Tony Morreale, articulated, in straightforward language, what occurs when a rapidly expanding enterprise abandons a hodgepodge of systems in favor of a cloud ERP that functions as the organization’s control hub.
Cripps joined Meri Meri—a design studio based in San Francisco and operated in the UK, known for its seasonal offerings enhancing dining experiences from London to Reno—during the pandemic. He encountered a firm with impressive creativity but an overstrained back office. Shopify, Amazon, B2B portals, and a galaxy of 3PLs all contributed to a heavily tailored legacy ERP. The infrastructure never fully held up. Reports stalled. Orders got stuck in queues. “Every day brought a challenge,” he recounts. “If a report was generated, people brewed coffee while it froze.” Decision-making plummeted to the pace of a circling progress wheel. In a global operation that designs holiday products two years ahead and dispatches to two continents, unpredictability is more than just an inconvenience; it is a hindrance.
Meri Meri found itself at a familiar juncture: pay a premium to re-establish an outdated system already patched with temporary solutions, or begin anew with something designed for optimal performance in the cloud. Cripps had implemented ERPs before. This time, NetSuite’s attraction was less about features and more about structure. “Don’t attempt to mold NetSuite to your business—adapt your processes to align with best practices,” he advises. The company employed OneWorld to harmonize a UK-led, US-registered framework and minimized customization. The deployment spanned two and a half years in calendar terms, not due to intricacy but because the organization had only one secure cutover period—April to June—each year. A sandbox was set up swiftly; teams probed, tested, and proposed modifications; and when the switch was finally flipped in mid-May, something remarkable occurred: the noise ceased.
The first alteration was the daily tempo. Under the prior arrangement, the Reno distribution hub opened pre-dawn and then awaited someone, somewhere, to release orders. Under NetSuite, Shopify transactions appeared in the ERP in roughly half a minute, hit the DC pick list shortly thereafter, and were packed within five minutes. The pendulum swung from frustration to efficiency so rapidly that customers began emailing ten minutes post-checkout requesting to modify orders already packed in boxes. Cripps’s benchmark for success was delightfully unsophisticated. “By the end of June, it felt as though we had never been without it,” he remarks. The floor went silent. Exceptions disappeared. Customer service requests, once numbering in the hundreds weekly, dwindled to a few genuine user errors. Overtime nearly vanished. The team that had been putting out fires transformed back into a cohesive unit.
The financial impacts are subtle, as they arrive through absence: no overtime, no replacements, no morning delays, no expensive consultants to untangle fragile integrations. Meri Meri’s workforce gently reduced from the mid-nineties to around eighty through natural turnover, even as revenues soared by over twenty percent. Finance decreased without drama; the warehouse transitioned from two shifts to one and a half. Against the costs of a contemporary cloud ERP, those avoided hires alone translate into a six-figure annual savings—prior to considering the opportunity cost of accelerating operations.
If Meri Meri’s narrative is one of a creative manufacturer regaining flow, PetLab Co. provides the CFO’s perspective of a scale-up evolving from start-up instincts into institutional dependability. Founded in London, this US-focused pet wellness brand emerged in 2018 and capitalized on a surge of direct-to-consumer interest. When Morreale arrived, the financial infrastructure—entirely reasonable for an early-stage enterprise—had morphed into an obstacle. Month-end stretched to four weeks. Multi-entity consolidation was unwieldy. Inventory visibility at SKU level was hard to achieve. “I’ve implemented NetSuite three times,” he notes. “For a business just a couple of years into its journey, it’s the right scope at the right price.”
PetLab’s implementation in 2021 paralleled the professionalization of its operational rhythm. NetSuite automated bank reconciliations, condensed month-end to a matter of days and ultimately provided the granularity needed to answer the inquiries a scaled consumer brand must address: which SKUs are profitable, in which channels, and how does that shift with duties, packaging expenses, and evolving fulfillment paths? The company mapped its five US warehouses directly in NetSuite, reconciled tangible stock with system statuses, and progressed from a “never stock out” mantra to a more pragmatic approach: never be surprised. When US-China packaging costs surged, the team assessed the SKU-level effects and shifted to Vietnam, tracking margin impacts from the general ledger to the pallet.
The ripple effects are cultural as much as financial. Morreale’s team of eleven has not increased, even as revenue soared from approximately $70 million to well over $200 million. Automation has not diminished the department; it has elevated it. The monotonous tasks are managed by machines; personnel advance up the value chain. This, in turn, alters how outsiders perceive the organization. In the bootstrap years, PetLab cultivated trust with HSBC by presenting NetSuite-derived forecasts biweekly. When private equity came in to acquire a majority stake in 2025, diligence advisers referred to the numbers as “robust”. That is a simple phrase with substantial implications. Investors finance what they can have confidence in. Confidence begins with verifiable, real-time data.
Both leaders are pragmatic regarding artificial intelligence. Neither is in pursuit of chatty interfaces for their own sake. At Meri Meri, AI is already integrated into demand-planning through Netstock and will increasingly assist in drafting customer service responses and revealing cross-regional trends—California versus Florida, north-south seasonality, the nuanced differences in Halloween in the UK and US—allowing humans to devote their time to judgement, not retrieval. “AI won’t craft our products,” Cripps asserts. “But it will reclaim hours across the business. If you don’t adopt it, you’ll be left behind.” At PetLab, the appeal lies in scenario planning that genuinely aligns with how a finance team operates, using natural-language prompts and explainable outputs; until then, NetSuite’s core functions guide them significantly.
Ultimately, the argument for NetSuite here is not couched in the glamorous rhetoric of digital change. It is strikingly straightforward. If your warehouse waits for the system rather than the system facilitating the warehouse; if month-end extends into a third or fourth week; if customer service has transformed into an exception handling desk; if you cannot resolve a SKU-level margin query in the time it takes to stroll to a meeting, you are not merely inefficient—you are constraining your potential to grow. What Cripps and Morreale unveil, each from distinct industries and instincts, is that a modern ERP is less about a software acquisition than a managerial choice. It is a commitment to operate on standardized processes, to gauge silence as a KPI, and to regard dependable data as a strategic resource.
“By the end of the initial six weeks, it was as if we had never been without it,” states Cripps. Morreale provides the CFO’s version: the same team, approximately triple the revenue, with banks and buyers engaging rather than disengaging. For ambitious enterprises contemplating whether the limit they perceive is genuine, the lesson is clear. A haphazard technology stack necessitates more personnel to address issues. A unified cloud foundation amplifies growth—with assurance.
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