Furrst class: Meet the Aussie startup partnering with Delta Airlines to revolutionise pet travel

After moving to Singapore with her dog in 2014, Australian startup founder Jenny Pan came to a sudden realisation: what airlines use to transport pets hadn’t been changed in 45 years.

“They look a bit like laundry baskets — they’ve got those metal mesh doors. It’s a very typical crate design,” she tells StartupSmart.

“Those crates were designed in the 1970s, and they haven’t changed since.”

A former corporate marketing manager, Pan quit her job and put all her time into redesigning the pet travel experience, launching CarePod, a startup which provides comfortable, “first class” travel for our furry friends.

But re-designing a nearly 50-year-old piece of hardware is harder than it sounds, so with the help of local startup support network Muru-D, Pan took her idea to the US first in hopes of attracting ex-NASA engineers to work on the product.

“But I couldn’t get any on board, so we ended up in Germany working with an engineering consultant who’d worked with companies like Mercedes-Benz,” she says.

“While we were working with them, they kept being so surprised when they realised the crate design hadn’t changed in 45 years.”

Read the full story here on SmartCompany