Catcrew is going after the €2.35bn Italian cat food market that challenger brands left alone

Catcrew is a premium cat food brand built by Italian creator Luca Gervasi with venture builder Vivaio Ventures. The brand launched in Italy on 3 July 2026 with eight SKUs across wet and dry, split between Adult and Kitten lines.

It launched to a 12,000-strong email list and more than 30,000 Instagram followers.

The category the challengers skipped

Italy has 11 million cats and 9.1 million dogs, according to the XIX Assalco-Zoomark Report published in May 2026. Cat food accounts for €2.35bn of the country's €4.2bn pet food market (56% of it), and grew 4.3% in 2025 against dog food's 0.7%.

European challenger capital has gone almost entirely the other way. Butternut Box and Tails.com built the fresh-and-tailored playbook around dogs, with the UK's KatKin one of the few cat-first exceptions. In Italy, the DTC cat shelf was effectively empty.

Ecommerce holds 11.5% of Italian pet food, worth €483m, against 40.9% for specialist retail, with grocery in decline. A pure DTC brand is therefore competing for a tenth of the category, which is why Guido says retail is part of the plan: "We're already in talks with one of Italy's leading retailers, as they reached out with interest in listing us."

The audience was engineered a year in advance

"Roughly a year before launch, Luca set up an Instagram page where he posted exclusively cat-related content," said Guido. "He was able to transfer about 30,000 of his most loyal followers. At launch we transformed the page into the official brand page, so we started out with a sizeable, perfectly targeted following." After launch, Catcrew added another 9,000 in its first week.

From about six months out, Luca posted more cat content, then narrowed it to nutrition and went deeper, asking the community for advice and sharing what worked, building standing as someone with a view on feline diet rather than a creator who happens to own a cat.

Three weeks out, he started teasing it outright: a new company with Belen, his famously fussy cat, as CEO and himself as the intern. The DMs followed.

Generating pre-launch signups

The waitlist ran for the five days immediately before launch, against a password-gated site, with the promise of early access to the product, though no one had seen the range. The form was gamified with a short survey on the relationship between cat and owner, built around the premise that the cat runs the household.

It produced roughly 12,000 emails, about 6,000 of which included the cat's name, plus mobile numbers earmarked for WhatsApp automations. Age, weight and life stage weren't captured; the team wanted to prioritise conversion over depth on the form.

"Keeping the product secret until launch generates more hype and more email contacts, but the quality of the contacts is lower," said Guido. "Only half of the 12,000 actually had a cat."

How the list converted

The email list converted at around 0.5% in the first two to three days of trading, averaged 1.9% across the opening month, and held above 3% over the next three weeks, said Guido.

"Pet food is not an impulse buy," Guido said. It is a recurring, ingested product, bought for a pet the owner worries about and pitched against a brand the cat already eats. He credits three things for lifting conversion above 3% within a month:

• Veterinary authority. Alessandra Calini, the vet and nutritionist who advised on the recipes, makes educational content for the brand, putting clinical weight behind its claims on high-meat, grain-free food and suitability for sterilised cats.
• Community as social proof. Customer posts are amplified through the brand's own channels, turning the audience's content into evidence.
• Reviews at volume. The brand reports 230 reviews at a 4.8 average.

The messaging was never formally tested before launch. It came from Luca's community conversations and a Google keyword analysis of Italian cat-nutrition searches, settling on five themes: quality and safety, suitability for sterilised cats, home delivery, a low-commitment trial bundle, and the simple joy of living with a cat.

The channel creators already own

A month after launch, Catcrew pushed a 20-question survey to its list and Stories, covering demographics, feeding habits, channel preference and pain points. It has passed 2,000 responses.

"This is a lesser-known advantage of creator brands: you can get thousands of data points just by sharing a link in Stories," said Guido. "Traditional brands pay big money for those insights to consulting companies."

The brand is using the responses to sequence product development, prioritise channels and build retailer pitches. For a challenger courting Italian specialist retail, 40.9% of the market, a thousand first-party owner responses is a stronger opening than a follower count.

What's next

Catcrew has run entirely on owned social so far. An event, a PR push and a large influencer seeding programme are scheduled for September 2026, and the brand will attend Zoomark in Bologna in May 2027, the category's main Italian trade fair, with retailer talks already in progress.