Douglas Steuart and his wife Anne had a wonderful Labrador Golden Retriever named Collette. She was introduced to Vitalin, one of the first complete dog foods, while staying at kennels in Yorkshire. Collette ate with such eagerness and worked so well as a gundog while fed on Vitalin that Douglas and Anne were sold on the product. Douglas asked Frank Scott, Sales Director of Kennel Nutrition, the manufacturers of Vitalin, for an Agency to sell the product in the West Country if space ever came available.
A few months after returning to Devon from Yorkshire in 1975, they got a telephone call from Frank offering an Agency. It was conditional on an opening order of two tons of Vitalin for 400 pounds sterling, paid in advance. They accepted but looked with some horror at the big stack of eighty 25kg bags when it was delivered to their garden shed.
At that moment they had two customers, themselves for Collette and Anne's mother for her two dogs...
The next day Douglas went off with small plastic sample bags of Vitalin together with leaflets and left samples at houses where people had large dogs. When he returned a couple of days later with the back of his Citroën DS19 full of bags of Vitalin, he successfully opened new customers to Vitalin on a direct delivery service. - Direct delivery was the expected distribution method as the Retail Pet Trade had little experience of complete dog foods at this time.
The opening two tons was successfully sold within the first month, and they now had a growing customer base. As the business grew larger, it did not matter how well customers were pre-phoned for efficient re-fill distribution from the back of the Citroën, people kept running out of stock and demanded "fire engine delivery service" to keep their dogs fed.
At this point the value of good retail distribution was realised!
They therefore persuaded pet shops local to their opened customers to stock Vitalin and passed those customers across to the pet shops, and stopped all direct deliveries. They had become a Pet Trade Wholesaler.
The image to the left is of a poster distributed to pet shops to advertise Vitalin and actually stars Collette!
They then persuaded Frank that Vitalin should be advertised on Westward Television, but first, retail outlets in every town across the whole of the Westward TV area were opened in preparation. The television adverts (Sept 1975) worked well, as did a second successful TV run the following year.
The image to the right shows an advert that was printed in the TV Times alongside the telivision adverts, once again staring Collette. Have a look and see if your shop is listed...
In 1977, returning from Cornwall retail deliveries across Bodmin Moor in his by now well known Citroën 19, Douglas saw a white van sign written "VITAL BLOOD SUPPLIES" speeding on its way! The name clicked, Vital was close to Vitalin, just change Blood to Dog. Vital Dog Supplies was named! The trading name was registered soon afterwards.
For the first 3 years Citroën estate cars continued to be used for fast delivery, much to the amusement of customers. They had the advantage of riding safely and well even with a ton of dog food on board and their fast travel meant that two runs could be made in a day. They were never sign written for fear of easy police recognition for speeding!
BP then approached Vital Dog Supplies in 1977, to sell Beta, which was accepted conditional on doing a TV advertising run. This also was successful.
Other products were added to the range for distribution and the nusiness just continued to grow.
Collette continued to happily enjoy eating Vitalin till the end of her days, she passed away in 1981 at the grand age of 18. She never realised what was to grow out of her eating habits.
By sheer chance Douglas was introduced to personal computers very early, buying one of the first available models in the UK, the Tandy TRS 80 Model I in 1978, followed by the Model II in 1979, this had a 4MHz processor, 32K of RAM and used floppy disks. He quickly learned and enjoyed programming and wrote the early programs for purchase ledger and stock control which were in use by 1980.
Because of the growing business, programming was soon delegated to a more expert person, Tony Elston who later joined the Vital Dog Supplies Board, while Douglas continued to design and then implement the constantly improving programs and computers for the company.
Douglas had experienced the arrival of the early mainframe computers into the UK business world. The most common response when dealing with companies that had installed mainframes was "The computer won't allow us to do that!" He was determined that the Vital computers would always do what was required, and that as the requirements changed so would the programs and quickly! Useful customer information and absolute up-to-date price lists every month would be an automatic product of this.
Vital Dog Supplies Ltd. was incorporated in 1981, but was still a very small West Country wholesaler, something had to be done to strengthen the business volumes and prevent them being crushed by larger or richer competitors. The only strong asset they had was their very good programming and rapid response to change.
Vital Dog Supplies were therefore able to offer the use of their advanced and specialised programs plus their computer expertise to other Pet Wholesalers in return for a co-operative distribution relationship, mainly by recommendation from suppliers. This is how Ray Jones 1983, Albert James 1985, John Loader 1986 and Chay Pet Foods 1988 originally joined what was to become The Vital Group. Each in their turn provided fresh opportunities, new ideas, and differing computer programming and logistics problems to be solved.
The Vital Group now turns over more than 1M pounds sterling every week, carries over 19,000 products, deals with over 2500 trade customers, has six depot/distribution points and employees over 200 people. Its software and customer computer interlink are still the best.
A very deep and sincere "Thank You" to the many people who have helped make The Vital Group what it has become, including Anne, her always supportive mother, the wonderful staff, the suppliers and of course, the customers.
