Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, has seen the same story play out with growing pet brands more than once. A store builds its pricing, its free-shipping thresholds and its delivery promises around what works in its home region, usually somewhere in the Southeast or South of Brazil. Then it decides to sell nationally, and the first thing that quietly breaks is not the website or the catalog. It is the freight model.
A pricing model built on the wrong assumption
Picture a pet e-commerce brand that has spent two years perfecting its operation in São Paulo and neighboring states. Delivery is fast, shipping costs are predictable, and a free-shipping threshold set at a certain order value comfortably covers the courier’s fee. Encouraged by that success, the brand opens its doors to customers across the entire country.
Within weeks, the numbers stop adding up, and, as Hugo Galvao mentions, orders from the North of Brazil are still profitable on paper but somehow lose money after shipping. Customer complaints about delivery times spike from regions the brand had never really priced for.
Why shipping is not one number in Brazil
The reason is structural, not a mistake anyone made along the way. Freight costs in Brazil’s North can run several times higher than in the Southeast, driven by longer distances, less transportation infrastructure, and a heavier reliance on a mix of road and river routes to reach some areas at all.
A shipping policy calibrated for São Paulo to Rio simply does not translate to São Paulo to Belém, even though both are technically the same country. For a pet business, this matters more than it might for other categories, since food and litter shipments are already heavy before regional freight multipliers get applied on top.
The opportunity hiding behind the cost
The temptation at this point is to treat the North and Northeast as a problem to work around, maybe by excluding them from free-shipping offers or quietly deprioritizing them. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho warns that that reaction ignores where a large part of Brazilian e-commerce growth is actually coming from.
These regions already account for more than half of the country’s online commerce, and delivery infrastructure there has been improving specifically because demand keeps rising, with logistics operators expanding air routes to reach areas that road transport alone struggles to serve efficiently. A brand that treats these regions as an afterthought is leaving growth on the table in the same markets its competitors are actively investing to reach.
What a deliberate expansion actually requires
The fix is not a single national shipping policy, since that is exactly the assumption that caused the problem. It means building region-specific pricing that reflects real freight costs, rather than absorbing losses quietly in some areas to keep a single free-shipping number simple everywhere. It often means shipping inventory into a marketplace’s regional distribution centers ahead of time, so the last stretch of delivery is short and predictable regardless of where the customer is located. And it means setting delivery-time expectations honestly by region, rather than promising the same speed everywhere and disappointing the customers furthest from the warehouse.
None of this is about avoiding harder-to-reach regions. It is about pricing and promising delivery in a way that matches the real cost of getting there, so growth into new regions adds revenue instead of quietly eating into it. Hugo Galvao has treated this as a foundational step rather than an afterthought while growing Enjoy Pets beyond its original base, building freight assumptions around actual regional data instead of extending a single national policy and hoping it holds. More on how that approach translates into practice is available at www.enjoypets.com.br.