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.
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.
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.
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.
Shopify
Custom Theme Development
Online Store 2.0
UX/UI Design
Metaobjects
Recharge Subscriptions
Pet Supplements
DTC
Content-Led Ecommerce
Yes. La Petite Labs is a daily supplement brand for dogs and cats, and the build covered everything from ingredient transparency pages to subscription styling. Supplement brands carry claim and credibility constraints that a generic store structure handles badly, so we design around them from the start.
That is our default. The La Petite Labs storefront was built from zero on a Dawn base on Online Store 2.0, with every section written as a custom section. Page builders make the first month faster and every month after that slower.
With metaobjects rather than hand-built pages. Each ingredient is a structured entry bound to specific products through metafields, so a product can show what every component does in the context of that formula. Adding a product does not mean rewriting the ingredient content.
Yes, and it is usually the point of using them. Once the structure and templates exist, your team creates and edits entries in the Shopify admin. La Petite Labs runs on that model after handover.
Yes. Content-led brands need editorial and commercial pages to live in the same design system, otherwise the blog looks bolted on and the credibility does not transfer to the product page. We build the editorial structure as part of the store, not next to it.
Yes. On this project Recharge was styled into the theme so the recurring purchase flow reads as part of the store rather than as a third-party widget.
Yes. We deliver from Tallinn, Estonia and Sacramento, CA, covering EU, UK and US timezones.
Yes. For La Petite Labs we started from the client’s brand book and reference material, produced the design concept, and built and launched the store from it. Design and development in one team removes the handoff gap where most detail gets lost.
Yes. Handover is a normal end state for us, not an exception. The section library is built so your team can assemble new pages in the existing visual language without development work.
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