Oh my god. Every once in a blue moon I bump into an ecommerce website that makes me love and hate it at the same time; Love – becuase we all love good ecommerce, and Hate – because it is so brilliantly, wonderfully done, that I hate it for being like that. In other words, I hate the fact that I had nothing to do with it and that I am not the actual person(s) who came up with all of these amazing things. But I’d marry them if I could.
The Farmer’s Dog is one of these website. It has the BEST onboarding experience. This is a 15-step onboarding that somehow feels like a conversation. It’s personalized before you answer a single question. It sells hard without ever feeling like it’s selling. And it treats your dog like a main character, because she is.
Let’s go screen by screen.
Landing page – looks basic at this point – but there are few gems here:
This will only take ~3 minutes per dog.
That line is doing serious work. You know what you’re signing up for and you know how long it’s going to take. Below it, three product pillars as short, visual representation.
This is the first screen, and the first thing you see is this gorgeous illustration. The visual language carrying half the experience, doing emotional work that copy can’t do.
That’s a trust signal. And trust, once established, lowers resistance to everything that follows. Including entering your email. Already delighted and intrigued. You also see the progress bar steps, which are short and precise and again, reassuring.
That’s it. That’s the whole screen.
No instructions. No form labels. No “please complete all required fields.” A sentence that completes itself as you fill it in. The interaction is so minimal it barely feels like data entry. It feels like introducing someone.
And that’s the first move: the flow is structured as a sentence you’re completing, not a form you’re filling. The difference in how that registers psychologically is enormous.
Once you’ve entered how many dogs you have, you also enter their names. This is not a small thing, the personalization is structural. The product being built is literally your dog’s plan. The food is her food. The summary says “Luli’s fresh Food” (and wait till you see the visual).
The named dog creates a psychological shift: this is no longer a subscription you’re buying. It’s something you’re building for someone you love.
But to be honest, you don’t know all of this yet. You simply enter the number and the name.
And now it’s about you. How brilliant is the “And I…” dropdown – it creates segmentation. I guess Someone who selects “already believe” gets a different email sequence, different messaging, than someone who selects “don’t believe.” The Farmer’s Dog just got a critical piece of marketing intelligence: where you are in the conversion journey. They could have asked “have you bought fresh dog food before?” That would have given them roughly the same data. But they phrased it as a statement you complete, not a question you answer. When you select “already believe,” you’ve just declared a position out loud. You’ve committed. You’re no longer a prospect who’s browsing. You’re someone who believes something and is acting on it.
Notice also: luli’s name is already in that sentence in bold. You typed it thirty seconds ago. It’s already structural.
And that is why, when asked to fill in your email address, it doesn’t fill like a toll. You’re already curious and delighted, and you’re building something for your pet, not for you. It’s a whole different entity. Also note the sentence “You can use your email to access your recommendations anytime”. So it’s not just blocking your access like wizards and quizzes we’ve seen before on other sites, it’s about accessing this later.
Next section is all about your dog. See the “The best part!” at the end of the first sentence? That’s the whole personality of this brand, right there. They didn’t have to write it – the form would work without it. But those four words signal something: we are dog people. We think this part is genuinely fun. We’re not processing you, we’re meeting your dog.
The screen then reveals, one by one as you answer, the questions about luli: she is / he is, age, spayed or not. Each answer triggers the next question. You never see the full list. You never feel the weight of what’s coming. You just answer what’s in front of you, and the next question appears.
This is progressive disclosure. But it’s not just a UX pattern here. It’s a pacing decision. The flow moves at conversation speed, not form speed.
If you fell in love with the onboarding so far, this is where you really want it to come home and meet your parents: Take a look at this dropdown. The plan doesn’t change based on your answer. The recipes are identical whether luli is the cutest or the most stubborn. There is no functional output from this questions.
And yet it’s the best screen in the flow, because it makes you actually think. Is your pet the cutest? The silliest? The most loyal? The fact that “most normal” is an option at all makes you pause, because you have to genuinely consider it, and that consideration, even for three seconds, is the point. A dropdown that makes you reflect on your dog’s personality is doing emotional work that no amount of product copy could replicate. You’re not filling out a field, you’re thinking about your pet as an individual, which is exactly where The Farmer’s Dog wants your head to be for every screen that follows.
The body shape and weight questions are next – first take a look at the illustrated silhouettes, specific enough to be recognizable. The fact that the show the shape both from a side and top view is brilliant. How much information can be shown in small strokes that represnt the ribs.
And then the copy – clear, direct, but not shaming.
Then, after you select body condition, a new sentence appears below: “Luli’s ideal weight is ___ lbs.” Not current weight, ideal weight, which orients the entire question toward where your pet is going rather than where she is right now. You’re already thinking about her future before you’ve bought anything. I’m not sure how many people really know their pet’s ideal weight, and they might open a new tab and google (or Claude) it, but again, at this point you’re so invested and curious to see what’s next, and you have your pet in mind and heart, and so it’s worth the effort.
The pattern by now is completely established: every question gives you illustrated options that you recognize your dog in, so the choice feels like identification rather than selection. This is the cumulative effect of using the same visual language consistently, delight and humor across every screen, because by the eighth or ninth time you’ve found your pet in an illustration, you’re no longer a person browsing a product, you’re a person who is deeply in the middle of describing someone they love.
Take a look at the brilliant (yes, I use this word a lot – and I will keep using it) illustrations of the mealtime personality options. To die for.
One sentence containing three data points, and a quiet masterclass in how to collect competitive intelligence without anyone noticing that’s what’s happening.
First dropdown: food category. Dry food, wet food, raw food, dehydrated food, fresh food, homemade food. The Farmer’s Dog now knows which category they’re converting you from.
Second field: brand name, a free text input. You type Yukunuma or Royal Canin or whatever your pet eats, and they now know exactly which competitor they’re replacing.
Third dropdown: treats, some, no, a lot of, which affects calorie calculations but also tells them something about what kind of dog parent you are and how much you’ll respond to treat-based upsells later.
Both dropdowns here are pre-set to the answer that requires no action from you, so most people will glance at it and move on in seconds. But if you change “doesn’t have” to “has,” a full tag cloud of conditions opens up, anxiety, bad breath, cancer, chews paws, constipation, all the way to urinary stones and vomiting, each one selectable and presumably each one affecting the recipe recommendation in some way. The design decision is that the default is health, and you have to actively choose to disclose a problem rather than being confronted with a checklist of illnesses unprompted.
The loading screen, which in almost every other onboarding flow is dead time you stare at while something processes, is here the closing argument.
Maybe this screen isn’t required at all with today’s speed of uploading, but it’s an opportunity to a) deliver the message b) makes you feel like work is being done after you’ve invested your efforts.
Left side: a bowl of kibble with an arrow pointing to it and the words “Not Food” underneath, followed by the subtitle “Highly-processed, burnt brown pellets.” Right side: a bowl of fresh Farmer’s Dog food with an arrow pointing to it and the words “Our Food,” followed by “Real ingredients. Made fresh.” The entire competitive positioning of the brand, the whole reason you should switch, is delivered in eight words across two labels while you wait for a loading animation, and it lands harder than any landing page copy because you’re not in sales-resistance mode, you’re just waiting for your results.
The results are in, and this screen has won the Oscar. Every element in it is beautifully done, brilliantly considered. I could talk about this screen alone for an hour – but luckily you are just reading this and can bail out at any point 🙂
Left side, in large handwritten-style font: your pet’s name. Below it: “Fresh recipes and tailored portions to help your 5-year-old, 80lb Belgian Shepherd Dog (Malinois) live a long, healthy life.”
Right side: three food pouches, photographed, each one labeled with luli’s name on it. The age you entered, the weight you entered, the breed you selected: they’re all in that sentence. The pouches have her name on them.
It’s like “The Usual Suspects” crime thriller movie (it’s from 1995 but you have to see it if you haven’t yet) – This is the moment where everything you typed gets reflected back to you. But unlike the movie, in our case it’s back as a product that exists for a specific dog, and the effect is that you’re no longer looking at a subscription box, you’re looking at something made for your pet, which is a completely different emotional relationship to a purchase.
Now let’s take a closer look at the options strip: how beautifully the bowls images reperesent what they are.
Notice what’s not there: a monthly price. Or a box price. Or any number that would require you to do mental math about whether this is expensive. Every option is expressed as a daily cost, which is a deliberate reframing of the entire value question. $2.46 a day is a coffee you don’t think twice about. $73.80 a month is a line item you scrutinize. The product is identical. The number is just presented at the scale where it stops feeling significant.
Each option also carries a clear articulation of what it’s for, not just what it costs. The brand is telling you explicitly how to use each tier, which removes the anxiety of choosing wrong, and it’s also quietly making the case that even the cheapest option is meaningful rather than a compromise.
Then the tags. Full portion gets “Best for your dog,” which is the health recommendation from the brand, that’s an obvious. But Topper gets “Lowest price,” and this label deserves more attention than it usually gets in UX writing. The price is already written on the card. You don’t need a tag to tell you which is cheapest. So the tag isn’t information, it’s permission. It’s The Farmer’s Dog saying: it’s okay to choose this one. You’re not being a bad dog parent by picking the lowest tier. We’re labeling it ourselves so you don’t have to feel any guilt about it – and they’re also adding “budget-friendly way to include fresh food” and “even a small serving supports health”. You’re a good parent. The tag removes the social cost of the economical choice, which is exactly the friction that would otherwise cause people to abandon rather than commit to a lower tier.
At the bottom of the screen, before checkout: “Trial Box: $2.46 → $1.23/day (50% OFF). Contains two weeks of food.” Two weeks is a specific and reassuring quantity. Not a “starter pack,” not a “sample,” not vague language about getting started. Two weeks. Enough to see a real difference in your dog, enough to get through the adjustment period, enough to know whether you’re staying. The Farmer’s Dog chose a trial length that’s long enough to work, and they told you exactly what it is.
Next screens show you upsell and building your own box options, but I’d stop here to recap what just happened.
ou came to a website. You named your dog. You described her in enough detail that her name ended up on photographs of food pouches. You entered your email address because you wanted to access the thing you were building, not because someone made you. You answered a question about her personality that had no functional purpose and made you think about her anyway. And at the end, you watched a loading screen call kibble “burnt brown pellets” and found yourself nodding.
Remember the “3 minutes per dog” on the landing page? At this point you don’t care if it took 10 minutes. The entire flow works because of one structural decision made at the very beginning: this wizard is about your dog, not about you. Your data has privacy attached to it by instinct. Your dog’s data doesn’t. Your email address is yours to protect. The plan for your pet is something you want to complete. The moment the subject shifted from you to her, the resistance dropped, and every screen after that, the illustrations, the progressive disclosure, the personality dropdown, the calculating screen, the name on the pouches, was confirmation that you were in the right place with the right brand.
Seriously, how can you not love and trust a brand that features this sentence on its website? You KNOW the food is prepared with love, by people who truly love dogs.
Takeaways
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If your product is for someone the buyer loves, design the flow around the beneficiary. Get their name early, use it everywhere, and let the buyer experience themselves as a proxy for someone they care about rather than as a consumer making a transaction.
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If your flow contains questions that feel clinical or uncomfortable, put the anxiety-reducing copy at exactly that moment, not at the beginning of the flow as a general disclaimer, but right next to the hard question where it’s actually needed.
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If you have a loading screen, it’s not dead time. It’s the last moment of attention before the reveal, which makes it valuable real estate for your most important competitive claim, delivered at the moment when someone is waiting and has nothing else to look at.
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If you have an upsell, frame it as completion rather than addition, because “complete your plan” and “add to your order” are the same commercial ask with completely different emotional registrations.
Dee2See by Lihi Lothan reviews DTC ecommerce experiences for brand managers and growth teams. We look at what happens between “I’m interested” and “I bought it.”
