Petco Love Lost
Mobile-first web app
1 in 3 pets go missing every year. So Petco Love, Petco’s non-profit organization, created Petco Love Lost to simplify the search and help reunite lost and found pets with their owners through innovative pet photo facial recognition technology. Petco Love Lost is now the largest lost and found pet database in the country, with 500K+ searchable pets and 3.2K+ shelter partners.
Head of Product: Aaron Klein
Digital Product Manager: Jessica Remitz
Copywriter: Ben Laun
Senior Product Designer: Abbey Price (me)
Completed while working at Petco Love
Image by Freepik
My Role
I am the lead end-to-end product designer for Petco Love Lost. I led the redesign of the product that went live early 2024. Now that we are in a steady state of evolving the product through feature enhancements, I conduct usability tests with rapid prototyping and quick iterations based on findings, work cross-functionally with stakeholders, development, and marketing to strike the balance between business needs and user needs, manage and scale the design system and component library, create high fidelity visuals, and test for quality assurance and accessibility.
The Challenge
Complex user flows in the first two iterations of Petco Love Lost (see image) posed many challenges including usability and accessibility issues, site performance, and roadblocks in the user journey which often prevented a successful experience or pet reunion.
Additionally, the site was not optimized for mobile despite the fact that the site is accessed on mobile devices by more than 80% of users. Given that pets get lost and found outside, we knew the experience needed to be mobile-first, fast, and easy to use.
Goals
The question we continued to ask ourselves as we redesigned and evolve Petco Love Lost is:
“Will [insert feature] reunite more pets?”
__________
With a goal of reuniting more pets as our north star, we prioritize our effort in the following areas:
Simplify how users report a lost or found pet
Optimize the search experience by leveraging machine learning and a custom map
New match alerts based on the reported pet’s photo
Platform integrations to aggregate reported lost and found pets into our results
Reunite More Pets.
Reunite More Pets.
I Lost a Pet – User Journey
Test, iterate, repeat
We are prolific in testing different hypotheses at every stage in the experience, primarily through moderated and unmoderated usability testing. Below are different iterations of the onboarding flow where we explored a guest user’s path to converting to account creation. The implementation of this dynamic multi-step form is a new feature in the redesign that will allow us be agile in testing different paths in order to identify the best moment to collect user data, pinpoint page abandonment, and increase account creations.
More account creations mean more searchable pets in Petco Love Lost which means more reunions.
Blue Sky - Report a pet with photo and search
Guest Flow A - Partial account creation to start searching
Guest Flow B - Search all pets by distance first, then provide info to report a pet and search by photo
A safety net for all lost pets
High-Fidelity Visuals
After solidifying functionality through wireframes and initial testing, I design high-fidelity visuals to ensure that our UI is cohesive, clean and intuitive. I then work closely with our engineering team to thoroughly test each element of a new design implementation. When launching larger scale features, we mobilize a team for user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure that everything is working as expected before launching to users.
And we don’t stop there.
If every community prevents two lost pets from entering local shelters each week, it would reduce intake such that no healthy, adoptable pet would need to be euthanized for space. Our product makes it possible to reunite lost and found pets with their families before ever having to enter the shelter system – so we are always looking for ways to improve our product to help more animals return home.
Feature Enhancement: Interactive Map 📍
Designed a custom interactive map that displays pets that have been reported in a searcher’s location. The map not only shows pets that were reported directly on Petco Love Lost, but also pets reported by our shelter partners as well as users on Neighbors and Nextdoor.
This feature makes it easy for users to target their search to a specific areas, view pet sightings, and view pets at local shelters.
User growth increased by ~19% since this feature launched, indicating improved reach and engagement.
Launched March 2025 🚀
Feature Enhancement:
Search Party 🎉
With this feature, pet parents who lost a pet can turn their community into a search party to help bring their pet home faster. With the ability to quickly invite their friends and family to join the search, search partiers have access to a pet search checklist and can coordinate tasks like hanging lost pet posters, checking local shelters, and sharing across social media. Pet parents can also share updates with their group that are delivered via email and browser notifications.
A goal of this feature was to increase sign-ups. Since launch in October 2025, we have averaged ~40 new sign-ups per day.
Launched October 2025 🚀
Our Impact
The newly designed Petco Love Lost launched in February 2024. Post-launch features enhancements focus on establishing Petco Love Lost as the central source to report lost and found pets, continuing to optimize the search experience, and scaling with more platform integrations.
173K+
Pet Reunions
*Cumulative since July 2021
500K+
Searchable Pets
437K+
Average Monthly Users
96% of users who have taken the reunion survey recommend Petco Love Lost
Awards + Recognitions
Webby Award Nominee
Websites and Mobile Sites
Web Services & Applications 2025
Webby Award Honoree
Websites and Mobile Sites
Best Use of AI 2025
Anthem Award Gold Winner
Best Use of Technology 2024
Anthem Award Gold Winner
Product 2024
Anthem Award Silver Winner
Partnership or Collaboration 2024