How Spot & Tango Went From an Apartment in Queens to a Leader in Pet Food

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Pet food is one of the noisiest categories in DTC. Ninety million dogs in the U.S., a new brand every quarter, and most of them sourcing the same ingredients out of the same factories with different packaging. The brands that win do not win on better ads. They win on a different question.

Russell Breuer started Spot & Tango bootstrapped out of a studio apartment on the Upper East Side, with his wife cooking fresh human-grade food for their mini Goldendoodle, Jack. The original brand was called Brewer Premium. The website, in Russell's words, was "built on Squarespace and hopes and dreams." Dylan Munro joined him full-time in 2018 after leaving McKinsey, and the two of them cooked and packed every order out of an incubator kitchen in Queens.

Eight years later, Spot & Tango is a profitable nine-figure brand growing roughly 60% year over year, with a sub-brand (PupGum) that did over $10M in revenue in seven months. The thing worth understanding is not the growth rate. It is the discipline behind it. Three operator decisions stand out, and each one is worth stealing.

On the Menu:

BTW, this is just a taste of our chat with Dylan and Russell. Listen to the full recording here.

And if you’re interested in even more content like Chew on This, check out the No Best Practices newsletter: Build growth into your brand's DNA. Learn what's working in media buying, creative strategy, offer development and more–from an eCommerce marketer with 15 years in the industry.

Brands like Spot & Tango build capacity before the revenue catches up. Insourced manufacturing. Inventory ahead of demand. Co-packer runs and ingredient buys that come due long before the cash arrives.

That timing gap is the cash flow problem most growing DTC founders know too well. Flex closes it.

Flex gives high-growth brands a true Net-60 card: every purchase comes with a full 60-day float at 0% interest. Fund a manufacturing run or an ingredient order today, and pay when the revenue lands. And for the suppliers who won't take a card (your contract manufacturers, ingredient partners, freight brokers who've never heard of Visa), Flex's Bill Pay Later lets you pay them using Flex credit anyway.

Get net-60 credit built for growing brands →

Spot & Tango's original product was fresh frozen. Human-grade ingredients, formulated with veterinary nutritionists, portioned per dog based on weight and activity level. It was, and still is, a wonderful recipe. The problem was not the food. It was everything that surrounded the food.

Fresh frozen has structural costs the customer pays for: cold-chain shipping, freezer space, the daily defrost ritual, and the one-time-you-forget penalty. One of our hosts has been a Spot & Tango customer since order number 548 and has lived through that exact scenario. As the category got noisier, more brands piled into the fresh frozen lane. The differentiation began to dull. Russell named the format problem directly: there are "cost challenges and convenience challenges" baked into fresh frozen itself.

"We just listen to the customer," Russell said. "DTC is first party data."

When the team asked existing customers what they would change, the answer was not better ingredients. It was a better format. Could the same fresh, human-grade food show up in something that didn't live in the freezer? Could the brand keep the input quality and change the output ritual? That question, asked at scale, became the product brief.

Dylan framed the moment of decision: "We sort of looked at ourselves and said, hey, is there a different way up the mountain here?" The mountain was the same mountain. The path was new.

Unkibble launched in April 2020. Same ingredient deck as the fresh frozen recipes. Same per-dog portioning. The water gets extracted through a novel fresh-dry process, which makes the food shelf stable, scoop-and-serve, and easier to ship. It looks like kibble. It is not kibble.

Unkibble is now Spot & Tango's best-selling product and a nine-figure brand on its own. It also gave the company a moat fresh frozen alone could not: a format competitors cannot easily copy, because it requires a different supply chain, a different manufacturing setup, and a different ingredient discipline.

What you can do: When your category gets crowded, do not fight on the same axis. Ask customers what they tolerate about your format, and rebuild the format around what they actually want.

Most DTC brands run two scoreboards: a CAC dashboard for the marketing team, and an LTV dashboard for the lifecycle team. Spot & Tango runs one. Their target is cumulative payback in less than six months, measured on margin LTV, not revenue LTV.

"We actually need to be making money on that customer," Dylan said. "We always keep a pretty strict guideline there." That single number governs how much they spend, where they spend it, and which cohorts they trust.

The result is not theoretical. Spot & Tango is growing roughly 60% year over year, profitably, while spending more on marketing and watching CAC come down at the same time. That breaks the prevailing belief that CAC inflates as a brand scales. CAC only inflates when the team treats acquisition as separate from retention.

The trap with siloed teams: a paid acquisition team can hit its CAC target by buying low-quality traffic or stacking aggressive discounts that crush conversion. The cohort then leaks LTV three months later, and nobody owns the bill.

Spot & Tango's marketing team is held accountable to 15-day, 30-day, and 90-day retention metrics on the cohorts they acquire. "If you sort of have that 50, 50 split," Dylan said, "the incentives aren't to really make the best full return on capital and payback equation work." So they removed the split. Lifecycle owns referrals (a CAC lever). Marketing owns retention (an LTV lever). Both teams report into one payback equation.

Russell trains every new hire on the payback equation in week one: ops, marketing, and CX, all on the same vocabulary. Dylan whiteboards CAC, LTV, and payback for junior engineers so the portal tweak they ship next week is tied back to retention. As Dylan put it: "no matter who you are at the business, even if it's not obviously important to their role, they really understand all the metrics."

The other half is infrastructure. Spot & Tango outgrew Shopify and Recharge years ago, because off-the-shelf subscription tools could not run six-month cohort tests. They built a custom site, a feature-flag system, and a data pipeline into BigQuery and Omni (the new dashboard from ex-Looker founders). That stack lets them ask the question that matters: not "did this button color lift conversion this week," but "did this cohort retain six months later." Vertical integration of Unkibble manufacturing slots into the same logic. It was a margin win, but it was also a retention win, because in-stock product and consistent quality keep subscribers from churning.

What you can do: Stop reporting CAC and LTV on separate dashboards. Hold the team that acquires each cohort accountable for how that cohort retains at 30 and 90 days.

Spot & Tango sells treats, supplements, and accessories. None of them are sold to non-subscribers. You cannot buy a Spot & Tango treat unless you already buy the food.

That is intentional. Dylan was honest about why: "Outside of the food, most of it isn't super highly differentiated, other than the fact that it's just a higher quality supplement, higher quality treat." These products are AOV and LTV boosters for already-acquired customers. They are not designed to win against Chewy or Amazon at the top of the funnel. Forcing them to do that would dilute the marketing budget and confuse the funnel.

PupGum is different. It is a clinically-backed postbiotic that addresses the actual root cause of bad breath in dogs: plaque and bacteria on the teeth. It does not mask the smell. It is, in Dylan's words, "one of the first clinically proven ingredients to do so." The brand pulled nostalgic cues from Bubblicious, Hubba Bubba, and Big League Chew, and built it to look and feel nothing like a vet-aisle supplement.

Because the product was actually differentiated, gating it behind a Spot & Tango subscription would have capped its TAM. So they did the opposite. PupGum lives at popgum.com as a stand-alone sub-brand, with its own Meta ad account, its own Amazon presence, and its own price ladder. The result: over $10M in revenue in seven months, with customer acquisition costs that compare favorably to anything in the parent brand.

Here is the part that surprised even the team. PupGum customers have started organically discovering Spot & Tango food and converting onto the food subscription, with no funnel pushing them across. As Dylan put it: "they're just organically learning about the brand. And it's serving as organic acquisition for the main business."

That halo is a gift, not a strategy. The strategic insight is upstream: the team named what PupGum was (an acquisition product, not an LTV booster) and built the funnel around that lever. If they had launched it the way they launched treats, gated behind the food subscription, none of the halo would have happened. The acquisition halo only exists because the funnel respected the lever.

What you can do: Before launching any new SKU, name the lever it pulls (AOV, LTV, or acquisition) and build the funnel for that lever only, not all three at once.