Houndsy is one of the most compelling recent Shopify success stories in pet ecommerce. Founded by Pavan Bapu and Luke Wilson after a viral product moment, the brand started as a side hustle built around a simple idea: dog feeding should feel as well designed as the rest of the home. That early vision quickly turned into real demand. The founders raised $160,000 on Kickstarter to bring the product to life, both left their 9-to-5 jobs by 2023 to focus on the business full time, and Houndsy has since generated more than $15 million in lifetime revenue, with the company on pace for another $15 million in 2026.

Best known for its premium kibble dispenser, Houndsy has built a brand around turning an everyday routine into something cleaner, easier, and better looking at home. With its modern dispenser and growing range of feeding accessories, the company has reimagined dog feeding as a design-forward experience rather than a purely functional one.

But that same positioning also creates a specific kind of buying behavior. Customers are not just purchasing a pet accessory. They are buying a premium product for the home, which means purchase intent is often high, but conversion depends heavily on reassurance. Shoppers do not always buy in one click. They compare, hesitate, and pause at checkout with small but important questions that are often enough to delay or block conversion.

When hesitation blocks high-intent buyers

For premium pet products, abandonment is rarely about lack of interest. More often, it is about reassurance.

Shoppers reach checkout and stop because they still want answers. Is this the right fit for their dog? How does the dispenser work in daily use? What if it does not work in their space? What is the return policy? How quickly will it ship?

As Houndsy continued to scale, Sweat Pants Agency helped surface the next opportunity in the revenue stack by introducing Consio to the brand. 

Sweat Pants Agency is a performance-focused ecommerce marketing agency specializing in retention and lifecycle growth. They help brands drive more revenue through email and SMS marketing, customer journey automation, audience segmentation, campaign strategy, copywriting, design, and ongoing testing and optimization. Their positioning is built around turning retention into a measurable revenue engine, helping ecommerce brands increase reorder rate, improve customer lifetime value, and recover more demand across the funnel.

That matters because Houndsy was not starting from scratch. The brand already had strong fundamentals, with retention channels already playing an important role in how it captured and converted demand. 

What Sweat Pants Agency recognized was that some high-intent shoppers still needed something more immediate than a written touchpoint. Even with email and SMS in place, there was still revenue sitting in late-stage hesitation. That is where Consio entered the picture. Consio added a new conversion layer to it: real-time phone conversations designed to recover demand, answer objections, and move shoppers from hesitation to purchase.

The right call at the right time

Houndsy deployed Consio across a focused set of revenue campaigns designed to capture intent at key moments in the customer journey:

• Abandoned checkouts (last 15 days) : Shoppers who reached checkout but did not complete were re-engaged while intent was still warm, with calls designed to remove last-mile friction and guide them back to purchase.

• Abandoned carts : A higher-funnel push to convert shoppers who showed interest but did not reach checkout, helping move them from consideration to commitment.

• Active on site (never purchased) : Timely outreach to first-time visitors showing strong intent signals, turning browsing into a first order.

• Lapsed customers : A winback motion to reactivate customers who had not purchased in 120 days.

• New customer post-delivery : A post-delivery touchpoint designed to support the first purchase experience and set up repeat buying.

Across these motions, Consio enabled Houndsy to run a consistent follow-up engine that could scale outreach, capture responses in real time, and convert demand already present in the funnel.

Full A/B Test for Incremental lift

As Houndsy continued scaling Consio phone outreach, the team wanted to measure whether the channel was creating true incremental impact, not just attributing conversions that may have happened anyway.

To test this more rigorously, Houndsy ran a holdout analysis. Leads were split into two groups: one group received Consio phone outreach, while the other was held out as a comparison group.

Across the full 7-day test period, the Consio group outperformed the holdout group by roughly 21%. When the team looked at weekdays only, where normal operating patterns were more consistent, the incremental lift increased to roughly 23%.

CONSIO LEADS DROVE AN INCREMENTAL 23% INCREASE IN SALES VS CONTROL GROUP.

For Houndsy, this helped validate that phone outreach was doing more than adding another touchpoint to the funnel. Consio was helping convert more high-intent shoppers who were already showing buying signals but still needed reassurance before completing their purchase.

That made voice a measurable extension of Houndsy’s existing retention strategy: email and SMS kept demand engaged, while Consio added a faster, more personal layer at the moment hesitation was most likely to block conversion.

Why this worked

The program worked because it addressed a very specific type of ecommerce friction: late-stage hesitation from shoppers who were already close to buying.

Email and SMS remain essential for retention and recovery, and that is exactly why the role of Sweat Pants Agency matters here. Their strength is building the lifecycle foundation that keeps demand engaged across the funnel. Consio then extended that system into voice, giving Houndsy a faster, higher-trust way to engage shoppers when written channels alone were no longer enough.

“Consio has become one of our highest performing revenue channels, full stop. If you're running a Shopify store and phone isn't part of your revenue strategy yet, Consio is the reason to change that.”
— Pavan Bapu, CEO, HOUNDSY

For premium products, a timely phone conversation can create trust faster, answer objections more clearly, and move buyers from uncertainty to action.

The results

In May 2026, the program delivered measurable revenue impact across Houndsy’s Consio outreach campaigns:

• $55,879 in total attributed revenue

• 3,855 completed calls

• 16.99% connection rate

• 9.09% conversion rate on connected calls

The strongest revenue driver was Houndsy’s abandoned checkout campaign. In May, the campaign generated $33,267 in attributed revenue from 2,134 completed calls, with an 18.65% connection rate and a 10.05% conversion rate on connected calls.

Consio also helped Houndsy convert intent across additional lifecycle moments, including abandoned carts, active on-site visitors who had never purchased, lapsed customers, and unassigned calls. Together, these campaigns showed how phone outreach can turn existing demand into measurable revenue without requiring the brand to build a traditional call center.

For brands already investing in retention through channels like email and SMS, Houndsy shows what happens when voice is added as the next conversion layer: more reassurance, more recovered demand, and more revenue from traffic that is already there.