A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: Are you manufacturing any of these supplements, or are you gathering and repackaging them?
PG: It’s the latter. We’ve developed about 30 partnerships with leading suppliers of vitamins and nutriceuticals for horses to the point that we have just about every product we want to offer in SmartPaks. It’s a really complete solution for the consumer. There are some small regional brands we can’t justify picking up because there are a large number of products out there. But the ones for which we’ve seen substantial demand, we’ve been able to work out partnerships where they permit us to repackage their product. And that’s great for the consumer. It’s great for us because we don’t have to engage in two sales processes. One: here’s a different way of administering the supplements you use. And two: here’s a new brand of supplements other than the ones you’ve had success with. We were able to say, “This is the exact same thing you got when you were buying in buckets, but it’s fresher and it will be delivered in a potency protecting package. And you’ll get it automatically and never run out. And you’ll know that it’s being fed correctly because if the SmartPaks back up, you’ll know the horse hasn’t been fed.” So that was all good as far as the consumer was concerned. And the fact we didn’t charge a big premium meant they were getting a tremendous amount of additional value for either nothing or a very modest premium.