Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, notices that the current instinct behind most growing online stores is the same: if a hundred products bring a certain revenue, adding fifty more should bring proportionally more. In pet e-commerce, that math rarely works out as cleanly as it looks on a spreadsheet. A catalog can grow in one of two very different directions, and choosing the wrong one at the wrong stage tends to slow a business down rather than speed it up.
Two ways a growing catalog can expand
The first direction is width: adding new categories, new brands and new SKUs to reach buyers the current catalog does not serve yet. It feels productive because the store visibly has more to sell, and it is the instinct most founders reach for first when revenue growth slows down.
The second direction is depth: taking the products that already sell well and investing further in them through better photography, negotiated freight, more stock on hand and stronger reviews. It produces fewer new listings but more revenue per listing already in the catalog, which is a less visible kind of progress.
What adding new SKUs actually costs
Every new SKU carries its own weight in attention, not just in inventory. Someone has to write the listing, source the supplier, set the shipping rule and monitor how it performs, and a founder or a small team can only give real attention to a limited number of products at once before quality drops across the board. Marketplaces also treat a thin sales history the same way regardless of how many products carry it, so twenty untested SKUs rarely rank as well as five with a proven track record.
The cost shows up as a catalog full of products that technically exist but rarely sell, each one a little slower to ship, a little worse photographed, and a little less competitive than the seller’s best sellers. Hugo Galvao mentions that growth on paper does not always translate into growth in revenue when attention gets this thin, and the extra SKUs can quietly tie up capital in stock that turns over far more slowly than the rest of the catalog.
What deepening the existing catalog looks like instead
Deepening means treating the products that already convert as the priority for investment, rather than as a finished job to move on from. At Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao applies this by revisiting proven SKUs first: renegotiating supplier terms once volume justifies it, adding better content, and making sure stock never runs out on the items already driving most of the revenue.
This path tends to compound. A best-seller with better photos, faster shipping and a stronger review count keeps climbing in marketplace rankings, which brings in more organic traffic without an equivalent increase in the operational load a wider catalog would require.
Which direction fits which stage of a business
Width tends to make sense once a store already has the operational capacity, staff and systems to support more listings without spreading attention too thin. Depth tends to make more sense earlier on, when the business is still small enough that a handful of products decide most of its revenue, and every hour spent on an unproven SKU is an hour not spent improving one that already works.
Neither direction is inherently better. Hugo Galvao assures that the mistake is picking width because it looks more like progress when the numbers behind the existing catalog are the ones asking for more investment first, and a business that skips that step often ends up managing more products without actually growing faster.