Let’s face it, most pet food marketing talks a big game. Premium ingredients. High protein. Natural goodness. The promises are everywhere. But behind the labels, not every product actually delivers on those claims.
When the brand behind the product is Sealord, however, expectations are a little different.
Sealord has built its reputation on responsibly harvested seafood from New Zealand waters. And as part of their ongoing mission to achieve zero waste from their catch, they saw an opportunity to turn what would normally be by-products into something valuable.
The result was Skipper – a premium pet food range for cats and dogs built from high-quality seafood ingredients that would otherwise go unused.
It’s sustainability with a purpose. And if your pet happens to benefit from high-quality proteins and naturally rich omega-3s along the way, that’s not a bad outcome either.
Bespoke Shopify Development Built for Future Growth
Launching a new product line inside an established company like Sealord requires more than just a simple website. It requires a digital platform that can evolve alongside the product, the market, and the brand itself.
That’s where Hi Ho came in.
Sealord partnered with Hi Ho to design and develop a bespoke Shopify website for the Skipper range, creating a flexible digital platform capable of supporting both the New Zealand and Korean markets from day one. The website was carefully designed to reflect and reinforce the Skipper brand values – sustainability, quality ingredients, and responsible seafood sourcing.
Interestingly, the first phase of the platform wasn’t focused on ecommerce.
Instead, the Shopify site was developed as a validation platform, allowing Sealord to introduce the Skipper story, product benefits, and sustainability message to the market before activating online sales.
In other words, the technology behind the site was built for ecommerce from the start – even if the checkout button wasn’t turned on just yet.
Built for Ecommerce, Even Before It Was Needed
Although the website launched as a non-shoppable Shopify experience, the long-term roadmap always included ecommerce. Rather than building a simple brochure site that would need replacing later, Hi Ho took a different approach.
The team built a fully functional Shopify ecommerce platform with the purchasing functionality temporarily disabled.
This meant that when the time came to activate online sales, the transition would be seamless. No rebuilds. No migration headaches. Just a simple switch turning the store live.
Sometimes the smartest ecommerce move is planning for sales before the first product is even sold.
Designing for Two Markets
From the outset, the Skipper website needed to communicate clearly with audiences in both New Zealand and Korea. That meant building a multilingual experience that felt natural in both languages.
Hi Ho implemented a dual-language structure (English and Korean) that allowed the same website to serve two distinct markets without compromising clarity or usability.
The result is a brand experience that feels locally relevant, regardless of which side of the ocean you happen to be browsing from.
More Than Just a Website Launch
Building the website was only part of the project.
Hi Ho also supported the Skipper launch with Klaviyo marketing infrastructure, enabling data capture and segmentation from the start. Product-specific email flows were created so each Skipper product can trigger its own relevant communications.
On top of that, a full SEO setup and ongoing optimisation strategy was implemented to ensure Skipper begins climbing both Google and emerging AI search results.
Because in today’s digital environment, launching a product is only half the job. Being discoverable is the other half.
A Platform Ready for the Next Stage
What began as a sustainability initiative inside Sealord has quickly evolved into something bigger – a premium pet food brand with international ambitions.
With a scalable Shopify platform, multilingual capability, custom functionality, and a marketing engine already in place, Skipper now has the digital foundation needed to grow.
And when the time comes to turn on ecommerce?
The store is already built.