Your Dog Deserves an Oil Portrait With Her Gluten-Free Kibble

There’s customer service, and then there’s Chewy.com. After registering online, each of the pet supply startup’s 3 million customers gets a handwritten thank-you card in the mail. They’re also entered into a lottery to receive a surprise gift—an oil painting of their pet, one of 700 made each week by one of Chewy’s 200 full-time portrait artists. “We have an aggressive approach to customer acquisition and retention,” says Chief Executive Officer Ryan Cohen. He’s understating it.

About 460 of Chewy’s 3,000 employees are customer service reps trained in pet care. At a 24-hour, 30,000-square-foot call center in Dania Beach, Fla., they can tell buyers which gluten-free food best suits a dachshund’s irritable bowel syndrome and which poultry-flavored toothpaste will temper a cat’s halitosis. They’ll remember you, too. “We keep profiles, we take notes,” Cohen says. “We know their pets’ names.” Each year, Chewy sends more than 1 million handwritten holiday cards to its customers, wishing the “pet parents” a happy and slobbery season. Since buying out every stamp at the local post office in 2014, the company has begun preordering its postage.