From 100M to 1BN: Building a commerce stack for scale

When venture capital firm eEquity entered as investors around 2020, Pet Pawr Group set an ambitious five-year plan: scale to one billion SEK in revenue through organic growth and acquisitions. To scale profitably, they needed a commerce engine that could launch new brands, markets and stores quickly. A setup where costs didn’t grow at the same pace as revenue. And a system efficient enough for a compact team to run everything, because in the pet vertical, margins are thin. Dog food, cat food, and cat litter represent around 60% of sales – with razor-thin margins. Headcount is felt immediately on the bottom line.

That required a serious investment. Building a technical foundation capable of handling whatever came next – new markets, acquisitions, and technologies – without rebuilding every time.

"Fixed costs and systems have to be insanely efficient," says Martin Magnusson, CMO at Pet Pawr Group. "In our industry, there's no room for anything else."

Pet Pawr Group rebuilt its entire tech stack, with Norce Commerce at the core.

"Norce is native-built for this type of business," says Magnusson. "Large assortments, multiple markets, multiple currencies – it handles all that complexity."

The ecommerce stack includes:

• Business Central as ERP
• Voyado for CRM, loyalty, and product discovery 
• Qliro for payments
• Lipscore and Trustpilot for ratings and reviews
  
• Cash IT for POS
• Google BigQuery as data warehouse
• GrebCommerce as frontend

The goal was clear: one single system that could scale with them.

The clearest proof came with Pet XL, a major Norwegian competitor with 15 stores and two ecommerce sites, Petxl.no and Dyrekassen.no. When Pet Pawr Group aquired Pet XL, the company was losing approximately 80 MNOK in annual operating losses.

Within four months, Pet Pawr Group had migrated both ecommerce sites and integrated all 15 stores onto Norce. The digital price tags that already existed in the stores were remapped to be centrally. Pricing, campaigns, and product data, all unified.

But the real impact was’nt just operational – it was structural.. Pet XL’s head office in Oslo went from nearly 30 employees to two. Operations are now run by the same lean team managing the rest of the group.

Within six months, Pet XL achieved positive cash flow. By Q4 2025, less than a year after the takeover, the business was growing year-over-year – with a completely different margin structure.

"Black Week is a good example," says Magnusson. "We lost quite some top-line vs previous year, but got five to seven times better bottom-line results."

This is why they built the foundation. Because the product data, pricing logic, and campaign management already lived in Norce, Pet XL didn't require a year-long integration project. It took four months.

A sales and marketing-team of ten runs four brands, twelve storefronts, and 32 physical stores across Sweden and Norway.

"We're a very small team for this level of complexity," says Magnusson. "That was always part of the business case. In our industry, you can't afford anything else."

That's the return on the foundation. Norce handles product data, pricing, and campaigns across every brand and channel. That means scaling the business doesn't require scaling the team.

The investment was significant. But the returns compound. Every new brand plugs into the same system. Every acquisition gets integrated without adding headcount. The more they grow, the more the model pays off.

That was the goal from the beginning. Investing in a commerce engine that becomes more valuable the larger you grow.