About the Project

La Petite Labs is a pet supplement brand built on clinical credibility rather than shelf appeal. Its products are daily formulas for dogs and cats with fully disclosed ingredients, supported by veterinary contributors and a library of educational material for owners.

The brand came to SPLIT Development for the full picture: brand-led design and a Shopify store built to carry it. We handled UX/UI design and development end to end, working from the client’s brand book and a set of references shared on an early call with our designer.

The engagement was scoped as design and build with handover. The store is now run by the client’s own team.

The Core Challenge

Selling supplements for animals where trust, not the product shot, does the converting

A standard e-commerce structure was never going to carry this brand. Pet supplements sit in a category owners approach with justified suspicion, and La Petite Labs positions its products as fully natural formulas with open composition rather than as medicine. That claim only works if the site proves it on every page.

So we proposed building the store as a brand and content driven experience instead of a catalogue with a checkout attached. The design brief became a premium, scientifically grounded e-commerce experience that builds trust in the formulas and shortens the path to purchase at the same time. Education, credibility, and conversion had to sit in the same layout rather than compete for it.

Design and Development Solutions

A custom theme built from scratch on Online Store 2.0

The storefront runs on a Dawn base rebuilt from zero on Online Store 2.0. Nothing was assembled from prebuilt page builders. Every section on the site is a custom section, which is what lets the client’s team keep publishing new pages in the same visual language after handover without coming back to us for each one.

Ingredient transparency as a content system, not static pages

Open composition is the brand’s central promise, so ingredients needed to be a first-class object on the site rather than a bullet list inside a product description. We built the ingredient library on Shopify metaobjects, where each ingredient is a structured entry with its own content, reusable across the store.

The part that makes it work commercially is the linkage. A metaobject group is duplicated and bound to a specific product through a metafield, so each product gets its own ingredient page showing what every component does in the context of that formula, not in the abstract. The same ingredient can read differently on two products because the benefit being explained is different.

That structure also feeds the ingredient grid on the homepage, which gives the brand’s transparency claim a visible home on the first screen instead of three clicks in.

An education-led site structure

The brand publishes heavily: veterinary commentary, research summaries, and educational material for owners. We designed and built the pages that carry it, including the Expert Insights section, so that editorial content sits inside the same design system as the commercial pages rather than looking like a bolted-on blog.

The stockists page follows the same logic. Physical retail partners are presented as part of the brand’s credibility story rather than as a utility list.

Making the value case visible

One section we built compares a single daily serving against the seven to ten separate supplements it replaces. It is a simple piece of design doing heavy commercial work: it answers the price objection before the visitor reaches the price.

Product media and subscriptions

We built the functionality behind the product media, including the 3D product rotation, the certification marquee, and video review presentation. Subscriptions run on Recharge, styled into the theme so the recurring purchase flow reads as part of the store rather than as a third-party widget.

Client Result

La Petite Labs went live with a store that argues the brand’s case instead of just listing products. Ingredient transparency is structural, education has a proper place in the buying journey, and the premium positioning holds across product, editorial, and retail pages.

The site was delivered and handed over to the client’s team, who now extend it themselves on the section library we built.