Elbano Parilli is a Founder of LovedPack, a Los Angeles-based Dog Beauty company he started with James Jarman.
LovedPack is building a new approach to dog care around the lives dogs actually live and the relationship people share with them. The company believes that as dogs have moved further into our homes, beds and everyday routines, the way we care for them deserves to evolve too.
Rather than approaching grooming as a collection of disconnected products, LovedPack is developing a more understandable rhythm of care that connects wash day with everyday life.
Parilli and Jarman also conduct original research into the premium dog-care category, questioning established product assumptions and examining how brands help people understand their dogs’ needs.
For Parilli, building a meaningful brand requires both a strong vision and the willingness to challenge the ideas behind it.
Company: Lovedpack
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Elbano Parilli: I’m Elbano Parilli, Founder of LovedPack, a Dog Beauty company I started with James Jarman in Los Angeles.
We started with a simple observation: dogs are no longer living on the margins of people’s lives. They’re in our homes, on our beds, in our routines, and increasingly part of how we experience everyday life.
But the language and structure of dog care haven’t always kept up with that relationship.
At LovedPack, we’re trying to make care easier to understand while creating a beautiful experience for the person providing it.
We believe the dog needs the care, and the human experiences the beauty. Those two things shouldn’t compete.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Elbano Parilli: One of the defining moments for us came when we realized that having a product that worked wasn’t necessarily a good enough reason to launch it.
We had invested time and energy into developing something we genuinely liked. From a product-development perspective, moving forward would have been the obvious decision.
But we started questioning where that product belonged in a dog’s actual life. Was it solving a meaningful need? Was it making care more understandable, or were we simply introducing another product into an already crowded category?
Ultimately, we decided not to launch it.
That decision changed how we approached development. Instead of asking what else we could create, we started asking what genuinely deserved to exist.
For us, the bigger lesson was that building a strong brand requires being willing to challenge your own ideas, even when you’re proud of them.
Sometimes progress isn’t about adding something new. It’s about having the confidence to remove something that doesn’t serve the bigger vision.
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Elbano Parilli: One of our most meaningful simplifications was reorganizing the way we communicate dog care.
Rather than presenting four grooming products as unrelated purchases, we connected them through one understandable rhythm.
Wash and Soften belong to our monthly care framework. Reset addresses weekly between-bath care, while Glow is designed for everyday conditioning.
Four steps. Three frequencies. One complete rhythm of care.
This gave us a much clearer way to explain the purpose of each product, the relationship between them and how care can extend beyond bath day. The framework is a starting point, not a universal prescription; individual dogs have different coat, skin and lifestyle needs.
The result has been a more coherent product architecture and a clearer foundation for customer education and brand communication.
We’re still an emerging company, and we don’t want to claim extraordinary financial results that we haven’t established.
But simplification has already helped us make more consistent decisions about what our products are supposed to accomplish and how we communicate that value.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Elbano Parilli: We believe simplicity should exist in the customer’s experience, not at the expense of the work behind the product.
A thoughtfully developed formula can involve sophisticated ingredients, careful testing and substantial research. The person using it shouldn’t have to navigate that complexity to understand what the product does.
At LovedPack, we continually return to three questions: Does this address a real need for the dog? Does it fit naturally into the human’s life? And can we communicate its purpose clearly?
We also challenge our assumptions with independent research.
For our Dog Beauty Index 2026, we examined 100 premium dog-care products across 30 brands, deliberately excluding LovedPack. Only 10 products in that selected sample carried an explicit recurring-frequency instruction.
That finding didn’t mean the remaining products were ineffective or poorly formulated. It highlighted how differently brands communicate what a product does versus when someone should use it.
We also learned something unexpected: our research challenged our own assumptions about where the industry’s gaps really existed.
That willingness to question the evidence, rather than simply search for confirmation, has become an important part of how we think.
The goal isn’t to make everything simpler at any cost. It’s to eliminate unnecessary confusion while protecting quality, individual needs and thoughtful care.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Elbano Parilli: The biggest resistance has been learning to separate our commitment to the vision from our attachment to individual ideas.
When you’re building a brand, every concept represents time, work, imagination and possibility.
We constantly study great brands, challenge ourselves and explore opportunities to create something distinctive. That curiosity is essential to LovedPack, but it can also make every new idea feel worth pursuing.
Walking away from a product we’d already developed forced us to confront that tension.
We realized that being emotionally invested in an idea doesn’t automatically make it the right decision for the business.
There is also a natural pressure to keep expanding: more products, more categories, more features. From the outside, adding things can look like progress.
But we’ve learned that protecting what makes LovedPack distinctive sometimes requires doing less, not more.
For us, overcoming that resistance means returning to the original purpose of the brand and being willing to question anything that doesn’t genuinely contribute to it.
We’re committed to the vision, not permanently attached to every idea we’ve had along the way.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Elbano Parilli: My advice would be to start with the customer’s real life, not your product catalog.
At LovedPack, we’ve learned that people don’t experience dog care as a collection of product categories.
They experience it through ordinary moments: coming home from a walk, bath day, getting ready to leave the house or sharing the sofa with their dog.
Those moments exist whether or not a brand creates products for them.
Our responsibility is to understand which moments genuinely need a solution and which don’t.
The same thinking applies beyond dog care. Before introducing another feature, service or process, ask whether it solves something meaningful or simply makes the business appear more sophisticated.
We’ve also learned that admiration isn’t imitation. Studying successful brands can teach you a great deal, but copying everything they do won’t necessarily help you create something original.
As a CEO, I believe one of the most important responsibilities is protecting the clarity of the bigger vision while remaining open to challenging the decisions made along the way.
A strong vision doesn’t just tell you what to build. It gives you the confidence to decide what not to build.
