BUSINESS PROFILE
Co-Founder of Waggel
Waggel’s Ross Fretten
“We started Waggel because we wanted to rip apart the insurance industry and redefine it”
During lockdown, I got a puppy. And as much fun as having little Freddie in my life is, he comes with a lot of responsibility. One of the first jobs was finding pet insurance, and after hours of research, I signed up with Waggel, a new pet-only insurer. In June, I received my first newsletter from them, which celebrated Pride month with a very personal story by co-founder and former The Apprentice contestant, Ross Fretten. The letter spoke of his LGBTQ journey and how his dog helped with his depression and anxiety. Without even knowing it, I had been supporting an LGBTQowned business, so I called up Ross to chat about why he created Waggel and his plans to revolutionise the insurance industry.
How is Waggel different from other pet insurers?
Insurance has this image of being, typically, old, ex-banker types sitting around hedging bets on medical bills. At Waggel, we have a very different approach. As pet owners ourselves, we wanted to create a better experience for other pet owners. Neither I nor [my co-founder] Andrew come from insurance backgrounds. Our ambition for Waggel is purely about creating a better experience for our customers, and insurance is one of the key criteria for doing that. Removing that anxiety around medical bills and being able to care for your pet is really important.
Waggel, ultimately, is all about the aspirational side of pet ownership — we’re trying to make it easier and more joyful for young people to own a dog. There’s no other insurer that caters for millennials; none of them caters for people to take their dogs to work in London. Other insurers can be run by people who don’t understand technology or what being digital means. They don’t understand the core philosophy of being user-centred or customer-centric, and building features and products around what customers actually want and what their natural behaviours are, rather than trying to bend customers to your whim as a service provider.
How do you appeal to millennials?
Millennials like me have very different expectations from brands we interact with and products that we buy and use compared to previous generations. Typically, we crave authenticity, sincerity and communication. When we are buying products, we expect the process to be very transparent so that we can fully understand what we’ve bought, how it works and how we can get the most value from it.
In insurance, the terminology is all very jargon-heavy and confusing, which is partly by design and partly through a lack of care. As a result, you end up with what I call a ‘grudge purchase’ — pet owners know that they need it, but they don’t understand why or how. Older generations are a little bit more willing to put up with that, whereas we millennials simply aren’t, we are a lot more selective, and rightly so, about where we spend our money.
At Waggel, we are trying to be as transparent as possible. We strive to offer succinct and clear documentation for our members, so they can really understand the key bullet points: here’s what you’re covered for and here’s what you’re not. There are no ‘gotcha clauses’, as I call them.
It also comes down to how you interact with your customers, so your typical 55-year-old baby boomer with a dog expects to call their insurance company and have this horrible fight. It’s like extracting teeth trying to get a claim paid, but we’d much rather interact with our customers for our mutual interest. We want to pay claims and we want to make it easy for our customers to understand how to make a claim, rather than having these horrible conflict moments when their claims are not getting paid out. Our whole website is built around the concept of simplicity and transparent communication. I know it sounds really silly and simple to say that, because you’d think these would be the priorities of every insurer in the world, but unfortunately that’s not the case. If another insurer was doing that and they were catering for the needs and requirements of millennials, then we wouldn’t have even started Waggel. We’ve done it because we wanted to rip apart the insurance industry and redefine it for our generation.
I really did not want to test your services so early in my pup’s life, but I recently had to make a claim on Waggel and it would only let me insert a sentence on my dog’s case and then the rest was to be dealt with between Waggel and my vet.
Why should you have to do more? I remember [making a claim] with a premium market leader and having to put down medical jargon that I didn’t even come close to understanding or knowing whether it was related to a previous condition I had claimed for. There’s so much onus on the customer to become a pseudo vet and then, if they do get it wrong, the insurance companies [have the opportunity to screw you over]. So, per your experience, why? You’re not a vet, and we really only ask for a sentence just to [keep things in order] if you have multiple claims. We want to make it as quick and easy as possible for you: let us know you have a claim and let us deal with the rest. That is how all insurance should work.
What are the advantages of insuring your pet with Waggel?
Waggel is as much about lifestyle as insurance, for example, members get free access to FirstVet, [an app allowing you to video-call a vet, so you can avoid the vet’s clinic when possible] and we have a behaviour specialist on our platform, too. Healthfocused millennials are caring for their dog in a more holistic way than the baby boomers. If they have any concerns about their pet, rather than going to a vet, which they wouldn’t typically do for a behavioural issue, they can log on to their Waggel member’s area and have a free Zoom call with our in-house behaviour specialist. So, they’re not just paying for insurance with us; instead, we are providing them with a more holistic service. Our behaviour specialist has helped hundreds of our customers already with everything from separation anxiety to pet boredom because of
lockdown and showing how people can keep their dogs happier when they’re confined to the house together. On top of that, there are the more aspirational lifestyle things we offer, such as big discounts with our hand-selected premium pet partners, and we support our members with personalised advice tailored to them and their pet to help with PUPPYGEDDON, as we call it.
Your office must be full of dogs. How do you provide a dog-friendly work environment?
We didn’t really take any formal steps to do so, but what I do say to people is, “It’s not a freefor-all.” If people work for us and they have a dog, it’s not a case of, “You can bring it in without question,” we expect them to behave like Sailor, my dog — meaning, if they’re disruptive or aggressive, they’re not welcome to come back the next day, but we’ve never had a single issue. Again, it goes back to that holistic approach towards dog ownership — all of our dogs get good food and training, and they’ll take some proper exercise before they come into the office.
What did you do prior to Waggel?
I was headhunted from university by [advertising and PR company] Ogilvy. I was there for five years as a user experience architect, so my role was understanding the wants and needs of customers and ideating concepts for products that would address those. I also worked client-side with several companies, helping them with innovation works. I was working on digital transformation projects and showing how to set up effective teams that could churn out innovative products rather than just boring, business-as-usual crap. I’d worked in the pet industry with several clients and then I got my dog and experienced it first-hand. I was convinced I could disrupt the pet space and make it better for people like me. I came up with Kibble, the dog-training and wellness platform, which I pitched on The Apprentice.
What did you take away from your experience on the 2017 series of BBC’s The Apprentice?
The biggest takeaway from that is how much business has gone forward. I truly do believe that business used to be like it is on The Apprentice — it’s about wheeler dealer, haggling, old, old, old business. The mentalities that go into it and blame culture is all very toxic, and in tech it’s the antithesis of that, I find. I said to the producers: “There’s no way I’d ever accept the offer on the table of £250,000 for half my business.” It’s a shit offer that would never have helped me grow and scale the business I wanted. I went on it mainly just for publicity for Kibble.
What happened to your dog-training app, Kibble?
When I was fundraising for Kibble, I met Andrew Leal, who was looking at pet insurance. We thought, let’s put the two together as pet insurance with a lifestyle membership, and here we are.
What do you wish you had known before you launched Waggel?
What I share with young entrepreneurs is to be confident in what you need, how you need it, what the trajectory looks like, what the roadmap looks like, and so on. Just don’t compromise — I think there’s a lot of investors out there who see that as a strength, rather than stubborn immaturity. I wish I had known that when I was younger. I mean, generally speaking, it’s gone pretty well, so there is nothing I look back on with regret or that I would have done differently. But some extra confidence in the early years would have helped massively. We all struggle with imposter syndrome, after all — the important part is to know that we all do. Those of us that thrive simply overcome it or persevere in the face of it.
During Pride month, you sent a Waggel newsletter which included a piece by you about being gay. Clearly, this was not tokenism or a yearly rainbow wash. Why did you decide to make your waving of the rainbow flag with Waggel so personal?
Waggel is a personal thing for me and it wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t had the experiences that I did as a LGBTQ youth. Ultimately, it was those experiences that I think launched me into a very long, 20-year battle with severe mental health issues at times. It was getting a dog that was absolutely the biggest turning point for me in that battle — I’d never ever have been able to get on top of it until I got a dog and it slowly removed a lot of that loneliness and anxiety that I had. LGBTQ youth over-index massively when it comes to mental health issues, and there’s plenty of science to show that dogs can often massively reduce the symptoms. If I can make dogs more accessible to people that otherwise couldn’t have them by helping them feel more equipped to have and take care of a dog properly — which is a big deterrent for dog-owning — and through that helping them achieve a better quality of life and be happier and healthier mentally, then I’d feel like I had contributed something significant and meaningful to the world that I can be proud of.
“I had a 20-year battle with mental health, and getting a dog was the biggest turning point”
What is next for Waggel?
In Q4 this year, we’re launching some initiatives that are going to help humans achieve a better quality of life with their pet. We’re going to tackle issues such as mental health, productivity, masculinity — all rich topics that millennials are very curious about right now.
There’s so much science that shows all the positive impacts that a dog can have on one’s mental health, particularly with problems like depression and anxiety, and that having a dog in an office can improve productivity and creativity. Some of the content will be in collaboration with household names and we will supplement that with the experiences of our Waggel staff and member submissions.
Hopefully, what we can also help our members do is grow as people and selfactualize through their dogs by giving them this really rich, beautiful, gorgeous content that educates, inspires and gives them actionable steps that they can take to ultimately become a more fulfilled person.