Broward County is home to the company that beat Amazon at its own game — and buried the ghost of Pets.com for good
By Brian French | FtLauderdaleBusinessNews.com
Quick Answer: Chewy, Inc. (NYSE: CHWY) is America’s leading online pet retailer, headquartered in Plantation, Florida, just west of Fort Lauderdale. The company books roughly $12 billion in annual revenue from about 20 million customers, with nearly four out of every five dollars arriving through its Autoship subscription program. Started in 2011 by Broward-raised entrepreneur Ryan Cohen, sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017, and taken public in 2019, Chewy has since pushed into pet pharmacy, insurance, and brick-and-mortar veterinary clinics under CEO Sumit Singh. It is the largest and most consequential technology employer ever built in South Florida.
Broward’s Quiet Colossus
Drive down West Sunrise Boulevard in Plantation and you’ll pass the headquarters of a company worth more than many household Wall Street names — without a single flashy sign announcing it. Chewy employs thousands across corporate offices, customer service hubs, and pharmacy operations, and its national footprint of automated fulfillment centers moves millions of orders a week. For a metro area better known for cruise terminals and beachfront real estate, Chewy is the strongest evidence that greater Fort Lauderdale can produce technology companies of national scale.
The origin is local, too. Ryan Cohen, who grew up in the area, launched the business in 2011 (originally under the name MrChewy) with co-founder Michael Day, running it from South Florida when nearly every advisor would have told them an e-commerce company belonged in Seattle or the Bay Area.
Exorcising the Sock Puppet
To appreciate what Chewy pulled off, rewind to the most infamous failure of the first internet era. Pets.com went from IPO to liquidation inside the year 2000, incinerating hundreds of millions and turning its sock-puppet mascot into shorthand for dot-com folly. For a decade afterward, “selling dog food online” was a Silicon Valley punchline.
Chewy took the punchline and built an empire on it. Four things separated the two companies:
Logistics came first, marketing second. Pets.com bought a Super Bowl ad before it had figured out how to ship a 40-pound bag of kibble without losing money — reportedly, nearly every order was sold below cost. Chewy inverted the sequence, pouring capital into a purpose-built fulfillment network — including highly automated facilities — positioned to put one-to-two-day delivery within reach of the vast majority of American households.
The country had changed. At the turn of the millennium, online shopping was a niche behavior on dial-up connections. By Chewy’s rise, e-commerce was second nature, and Americans had redefined pets as family — fueling a pet economy that swelled from roughly $23 billion in the late 1990s to more than $150 billion today.
Service became the brand. Chewy’s playbook borrowed openly from Zappos: phones answered by humans around the clock, surprise oil-painted pet portraits, holiday cards, and sympathy flowers when a customer’s animal died. In a business built on repeat orders, that emotional loyalty functions as a moat no ad campaign can replicate.
Patient capital, proven model. Rather than sprinting to the public markets, Chewy scaled quietly, then sold to PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion — at the time the biggest e-commerce acquisition on record — before its June 2019 NYSE debut at $22 a share.
The Autoship Engine
Chewy’s defining financial feature is subscription gravity. Autoship — customers scheduling recurring deliveries of food, litter, and medication — represents roughly 78 to 80 percent of net sales. Layer on spending per customer that has marched past $580 a year, and you get a rare retail profile: revenue that shows up on its own, quarter after quarter, largely insulated from discretionary whims. Pet food is the last purchase a struggling household cuts.
That recurring base is also what lets Chewy stand toe-to-toe with Amazon. Amazon treats pets as one aisle among millions; Chewy treats the category as its entire reason for being, with specialist service reps, veterinary partnerships, and a product catalog curated for pet parents.
From Kibble to Clinics: The Singh Era
When Cohen exited in 2018, the board handed the keys to Sumit Singh, a veteran of Amazon’s consumables business and Dell. Singh’s thesis: the real margin lives in pet health, not pet food. The execution since:
- Chewy Pharmacy, now the country’s largest pet pharmacy;
- Connect with a Vet telehealth and the CarePlus insurance program;
- Chewy Vet Care, physical veterinary clinics opening from 2024 onward — a bold move into services and a new front against incumbent vet chains;
- A sponsored advertising business monetizing the site’s traffic at software-like margins;
- Expansion into Canada, the company’s first international market.
Under Singh — joined in 2024 by CFO David Reeder, formerly of GlobalFoundries — Chewy crossed into sustained GAAP profitability and positive free cash flow, and began returning capital through share buybacks. The shareholder register evolved as well, with longtime majority holders BC Partners and PetSmart selling down and broadening the public float. The stock even had its own meme moment in 2024 when Keith Gill, of GameStop fame, disclosed a stake.
🎯 Brian’s Take
Every business school teaches Pets.com as a cautionary tale; they should teach Chewy in the same lecture as the rebuttal. The difference wasn’t the idea — it was sequencing. Warehouses before Super Bowl ads. Retention before reach. Broward before the Bay. Today the company’s center of gravity is shifting from commerce to care, and that’s the right move: kibble builds trust, but pharmacies, insurance, and exam rooms convert trust into margin. My watch list: clinic buildout costs (real estate and vets are expensive), a maturing pet population post-pandemic, and Amazon’s infinite patience. Still, show me another retailer where four-fifths of revenue renews itself automatically. That’s not a store — that’s a toll road with a wagging tail. Verdict: South Florida’s flagship public tech company, and still the best-run specialty retailer in America.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Chewy headquartered? In Plantation, Florida — Broward County, minutes from Fort Lauderdale — at 7700 W. Sunrise Blvd.
Who started Chewy? Ryan Cohen and Michael Day founded it in 2011; Cohen later became known as GameStop’s chairman.
Who is Chewy’s CEO now? Sumit Singh, a former Amazon and Dell executive, has led the company since 2018.
What is Autoship? Chewy’s subscription program for recurring deliveries — it generates roughly 78–80% of company revenue and is the core of the business model.
Is Chewy profitable? Yes — the company has achieved sustained GAAP profitability and positive free cash flow in recent fiscal years, per its SEC filings.
Does Chewy have physical locations? Yes. Beyond fulfillment centers and pharmacies, Chewy began opening Chewy Vet Care veterinary clinics in 2024.
What happened to Pets.com, and is Chewy related to it? Pets.com was an unrelated dot-com-era retailer that failed in 2000 due to unsustainable shipping economics and premature spending; Chewy succeeded two decades later with owned logistics, a subscription model, and a vastly larger pet market.
Company Snapshot: Chewy, Inc.
| Exchange / Ticker | NYSE: CHWY |
| Home Base | 7700 W. Sunrise Blvd., Plantation, FL 33322 (Broward County) |
| Established | 2011, as MrChewy |
| Founders | Ryan Cohen, Michael Day |
| Chief Executive | Sumit Singh (since 2018) |
| Chief Financial Officer | David Reeder (since 2024) |
| Workforce | Roughly 18,000–20,000 |
| Annual Revenue | ~$11.9 billion (fiscal 2024) |
| Customer Base | ~20 million active customers |
| Operations | 12+ fulfillment centers, pharmacy facilities, vet clinics, Canadian arm |
| Public Debut | June 2019, priced at $22 per share |
Sources & Further Reading
Chewy investor relations (investor.chewy.com) — annual reports, 10-K/10-Q filings, quarterly earnings; SEC EDGAR; American Pet Products Association market statistics; South Florida Business Journal and Sun Sentinel local coverage; national reporting from Bloomberg, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal; academic case studies on Pets.com and the dot-com collapse.
About the Author
Brian French is a senior business and technology writer at FtLauderdaleBusinessNews.com, covering Broward County’s public companies, growth-stage startups, and the executives driving South Florida’s economy. His “Brian’s Take” column delivers candid analysis of the region’s most important businesses.
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