23 May 2025
Vet turned pet bed expert Lauren Davis takes us through her journey from job hopping to launching her own animal-related business, including the pitfalls along the way…
Lauren Davis
Job Title
Lauren Davis
I ran an assembly at my daughter’s school career week recently, inspiringly titled, “You don’t need to know what you want to do yet”, and subtitled, “No one ever tells you pet mattress expert is a job”.
During 10 minutes, I wove a tale familiar to many: a smart child with a love for animals set on a veterinary career path, single-minded focus, and a tumultuous relationship with the reality of clinical practice.
A hall of six and seven year olds followed my journey as, after five jobs in five years, I diversified into a technical vet position, then again into clinical content writing, both freelance and corporate. With a three-month maternity leave thrown into the mix, I had taken my job total to eight in eight years. Not a particularly inspiring CV, so much so that an interviewer once haughtily declared it “disparate”.
Invested in the story, there was a gasp from the kids as I moved to job number nine – I had given up on veterinary altogether. I became, officially, a “leaver”. Perhaps, I rationalised, the problem was the veterinary profession (spoiler alert, it wasn’t).
Frustrated, and with a nine-month baby in tow, I pooled everything I knew about client communication, marketing and sales, and started in the commercial arm of a human health care mattress firm. Nod to any other potential leavers here; your skill set is amazingly transferable.
There isn’t much glamour in mattresses, but like everything, the more you learn, the more there is to know. I became deeply invested in the impact good quality sleep has on health, and how sleep surfaces can impact outcomes. In the human health care space, your mattress is a clinical choice. The mattresses themselves are registered medical devices, as the impact on pain, circulation and recovery is so stark.
Despite a growing passion for sleep health, and taking the company through the COVID-19 pandemic (a story in itself), I still struggled with my identity. Three years after starting again outside the veterinary industry, I was asked what my job was, to which I replied, “I’m a vet, but now I make mattresses”. I left that conversation with “I’m a vet” ringing in my ears. Was I?
I closed the assembly with job 10 – setting up VetRelieve. Every entrepreneur has that moment when they decide they are going to go it alone, and I vividly remember sitting in a cafe in Leeds, incorporating a company on the .gov website with nothing but an idea. Looking back at the veterinary world, I didn’t see any of the importance human health care puts on sleep quality. It wasn’t represented in our care advice for owners or in our vernacular around ward spaces. There were lone voices, but no champion for sleep hygiene.
Sometimes, the answer is obvious: I knew a lot about pets and a lot about mattresses, and was just naive enough about the stresses of starting a business to go ahead and set one up. I remain convinced that a certain amount of naivety is required to start up a company; too much knowledge and no one would ever do it.
VetRelieve was born in April 2023, manufacturing and retailing kennel mattresses for clinics, and orthopaedic dog beds for home environments. I truly believed I could start it up and run it alongside my day job. I did mention I was naive. By June, I was in my notice period.
Here’s the other thing you need to be to be an entrepreneur: a risk taker. A cavalier attitude to risk, a rose-tinted vision of the challenges ahead and unerring optimism are a dangerous combination, but they get you started.
I was asked to write about some of the challenges of starting up a business in this article, and honestly I could write a book. The first is the simple deluge of “unknown unknowns”. I had thought (guess what, naively) that being on a board of directors, for a company doing broadly the same thing for humans as I was doing now for pets, meant I knew most of what I would need. This was fundamentally and almost cripplingly incorrect.
I might have fallen at this first hurdle if it were not for the network around me. I joke and say half the words I uttered in the first six months were questions. What are A and B shares? What is volumetric weight? How do I get manufacturing software to talk to both accounting software and a sales website, and spit out accurate margins? Setting up the business, the website, the accountancy, the socials – all of it was new. I pulled on favours from friends, I researched into the night, I rang every helpline, and slowly it began to coalesce into a skeleton to hang the product on.
By now, I was out of a paying job, and adding “risk of destitution” to a growing list of challenges. Despite this, I was determined not to cut corners, despite great temptation at the opportunity to save both time and money. A worthy investment.
Alongside the operational management was getting the products from inside my head into real-world, tangible assets with a supply chain. This is an easy place for new product businesses to stumble, as you enter a risk period – how do you know that your product does what you need it to do, with just a handful of samples?
In truth, you can only test what you can test. We went down the same route as the NHS and used pressure mapping to demonstrate the efficacy of our mattresses at reducing pressure over joints and providing supportive sleep surfaces.
We build features into our products to support both pets and users; for example, our VetRest kennel mattresses are double-sided to provide pressure relief to recumbent patients using the recovery side, and supportive comfort for mobilising patients using the active side. We tried hundreds of foam combinations and cuts to get the best one.
Once we were happy we had done all the testing we could, we released our minimum viable product. This is the “fail fast” stage; if there’s a problem with the product you haven’t anticipated, you need to know quickly and be poised to make changes. We escaped with just one major change: we had tested the fabric of our VetRest Duo for everything pet related, but hadn’t considered that our heavier kennel mattresses would be dragged by staff rather than carried. This dragging force split the fabric – a disaster. Thankfully, we rapidly sourced a better fabric, upgraded the few mattresses in circulation, and never looked back. I truly believe I will never match the stress levels of those first months of retailing products.
The future is bright for VetRelieve. I’m very proud that we are now seen as the gold standard for kennel mattresses in centres across the country, and our OrthoLuxe orthopaedic beds for homes are Canine Arthritis Management endorsed – a UK first. We’ve built that reputation by making sure our products are part of patient outcomes, along with making life easier for caregivers.
It’s my belief that if you do what’s right, the outcomes will follow. That being said, we do have lofty goals; I aspire to be the “Colgate” of dog beds – 8 out of 10 vets would recommend. For now, though, I’ll take the solid growth we have and, as always, stay ready for the next curveball.
