About New England Herpetoculture

I was an exotic animal hobbyist throughout most of my childhood, and having the opportunity to do this as a career is absolutely surreal. Below, I've tried to document a rough outline of the past decade's events which brought me to where I am today, and brought NEHERP from concept to creation.

2003-2007: Hobbyist Years & The Experiences Which Sparked An Idea
While I was in high school, I kept a handful of different Reptiles & Amphibians as an enthusiast. It wasn't an especially large or spectacular collection by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a fun way to begin learning. A few years went by, and while I was working & in college, I began breeding some different species on the side. I started with Leopard Geckos, got into Day Geckos, Bearded Dragons, and a few more common species. After my first seasons as a small-scale breeder, I became even more enthusiastic about the herp hobby.

Back then, I remember feeling critical of larger pet shops, whose husbandry methods (even while I was a beginner) seemed abysmal more often than not. I remember seeing little Leopard Gecko & Bearded Dragon hatchlings being kept bone dry on calcium sand, struggling to shed, and often times suffering from impaction. I can't forget seeing wild caught Anoles fighting in a tiny enclosure, housed next to captive bred Bearded Dragons, with a plastic divider separating the animals which allowed feeders to run back & forth between the two species. After doing a little research online, I came to the conclusion that not only were Anoles wild caught, but so were the majority of so many common species I saw at pet shops. (Animals like Green Tree Frogs, Chameleons, Iguanas, Tortoises, Turtles, Fire Bellied Toads, Monitor Lizards, Tokay Geckos, House Geckos, Whites Tree Frogs, Red Eye Tree Frogs, and so many more) I saw far too many frustrating instances of poor husbandry to list. Considering the frequency in which all these examples were out for display in the large retail pet stores, I personally came to the unfortunate conclusion that these problems might actually be commonplace within the industry. It wasn't a fun realization, and it's stuck with me to this day.

Then I attended a Reptile/Amphibian expo. The vast majority of small business owners, breeders, and enthusiasts who were vending at the show proved to be an entirely different, more enthusiastic & far more educational resource compared a traditional chain or large-scale pet shop. In most cases, the health & vibrancy of the animals offered by many of the small-scale breeders was a notable improvement over any I'd seen in stores. I received great advice, was pointed towards lots of great online resources, and the experience drastically changed my perspective. On the way home from the expo I remember thinking, "These people know what they are doing! Why don't more full-scale businesses offer those kinds of animals, resources & support?". I continued working with a number of different species, and my hobby grew a bit larger.

The animals I had been working with were always very exciting, but it wasn't until 2007 or so when something really jumped out & grabbed my attention. I built my first live vivarium. There wasn't much info on the subject available in stores or online, so I joined some hobbyist forums, got involved with the community, experimented by building lots of vivariums, and it was all downhill from there. I knew live vivariums were way too incredible to not become popular, there wasn't much informational support online, and there were only a couple places selling vivarium gear. I saw an opportunity.

Both the positive & negative experiences I had as an enthusiast helped to shape what I wanted to see in a company. First & foremost, NEHERP would be a strictly "no wild caught" business. It was critical to offer respectable husbandry advice, and to follow the same high standards for any animal in our care. I wanted to create a customer service model similar to what one would expect at a professional expo, where our staff could speak from experience when offering advice. One last personal goal I set for myself was to beat the negative stigma some people hold toward this awesome, and often misunderstood hobby. The focus would be on live vivariums, and the company's goal would be to support everything related to the creation of these awesome enclosed environments.

2008-2010: A Teeny-Tiny Startup
The ball really didn't start rolling until back in 2008, when I started testing different types of live moss in vivariums. Once I found a species which could thrive in a live vivarium environment, I began researching care & propagation techniques in hopes that I could eventually market the product. Eventually, the first samples of NEHERP moss were offered on forums for hobbyists to try, and with positive feedback on the product, we became the 1'st company online to offer pre-processed live moss for vivariums. During this time, NEHERP was an incredibly tiny basement business, with a grow room & stock area packed in a small space behind my apartment's kitchen. I grew up working for my family's business New England Wholesale Florist, and so the name "New England Herpetoculture" seemed like a natural choice.

When neherpetoculture.com first launched in late 2008, there were only a tiny handful of mostly dart frog & vivarium related supplies available. The website I wrote was terrible (no really - just god awful), the selection was sparse, but our plants were top-notch. Friends & fans of our small business helped spread the word on forums, and we began offering a few brand names of herp supplies along with an increased plant selection online. By 2010, the variety of live animal projects had drastically increased to nearly 200 individuals. At this point, NEHERP began sharing warehouse space with another family business. The next couple years sped past with the site's popularity increasing, and the supply selection expanding from a few dozen products, to a few hundred.

2010-2011 - The Retail Store
Towards the end of 2010, NEHERP opened a small retail store in New Britain CT, which offered everything available online plus an assortment of (strictly) captive bred, and often locally-bred reptiles & amphibians. During that time, the shared warehouse space in Meriden was primarily used for overstock supplies & plants, and the day-to-day business & online order processing took place at the retail shop.

The 3'rd version of our website launched around the same time the retail store opened, and while it was a small step in the right direction, it was still extremely basic. We added Exo Terra brand products to the lineup in January of 2011, and they've been some of our best selling products since.

 

Although this next part is difficult to describe, it's one of the things which helps set us apart from others in the industry. For us, there are essentially two categories of clients which we cater to. The first group includes both amateur and professional breeders, as well as commercial/educational enterprises (Zoos, nature centers, universities, and rescues). The second category is made up of hobbyists & enthusiasts. While we did have a limited selection of Reptiles & Amphibians at the retail store, but it was never our goal to become a large scale breeder. Sometime around 2011, we made the decision to minimize any competition between us & our breeder & rescue clients, and we discontinued nearly 90% of our breeding operation. As NEHERP grew and our friends in the hobby expanded, we found ourselves networking between the hobbyists and the breeders we had come to know and trust. Rather than carrying tons of live animals in-house, we'd simply point any interested clients towards one of the breeders or rescue facilities we worked with. Those organizations would reciprocate and direct the new hobbyists that purchased from them toward our site, and we'd make sure that the client and the animal(s) would be well taken care of. It was a symbiotic relationship that turned out to work beautifully. (...and still does to this day!)

The Vivarium Construction 101 article was one of NEHERP's main turning points, and is our most popular informational page to this day. It's strange to think about it, but the 1'st version of the article was quickly written while I was sitting behind the retail store's front desk, during lulls in sales when I was done packing orders for the day. The article helped to grow our web traffic considerably, and encouraged us to eventually expand it, and write far more articles as time went on. VC101 quickly became the most detailed, and one of the web's most popular online vivarium building guides.

In late 2011, an enthusiast walked into the New Britain retail shop and changed both my life & the direction of New England Herpetoculture from that point forward. Jess & I quickly began working together full time to further develop our best-selling Vivarium Substrate, Drainage Layer Substrate, Fly Media, Horticultural division, and more. These NEHERP brand products are our best selling hard supplies to this day, and have earned our absolute highest customer reviews.

It wasn't long before the quickly growing website drastically overshadowed the store, and Jess & I made the tough decision to merge the retail shop back into the original warehouse space. With the added space & customer suggestions in mind, our store was expanded to offer one of the widest selections of vivarium related supplies online.

2012-2013: The Warehouse Merge, Articles, & Mike W.
With the new products launched, things began to grow at a quicker rate. I finished the 4'th version of our website in 2012, and it was wasn't as terrible as the older versions. That was the first time our stylized "" logo was used, and it's been on every version since. A lot of new items & articles were added, and we also created our first enclosure specific Vivarium Kit products. We didn't realize it at the time, but these "vivarium kit" products were a big part of the future for NEHERP.

In 2013, we hired our 1'st full time employee Mike W, who has been with the company ever since. (Nowadays, he's warehouse supervisor) Mike W's herp hobby quickly grew from a few frogs to a few dozen species, and the expertise he gained over the years has helped NEHERP design new products & write new articles for the site. If you've ordered from NEHERP since 2013, you've probably received a box prepped & packed by Mike W.

By the end of 2013, we outgrew our grow room, over-supplied our supply room, and the website was due for yet another re-write.

2014-2015: More Products, Growing Pains, and a Wedding!
NEHERP V.5 launched in early 2014, was NEHERP's first 100% fully hand-coded site, and was the biggest improvement yet. Client reception was pretty positive, and the team was floored. Finally a halfway decent website! Between the new site & revised care articles, search engine rankings during this time put our company within the top 3-4 results for topics related to vivariums.

Shortly after the site launched, a handful of new products were released too. NEHERP Substrate V2 was great for a bunch of different species, and was a real hit with the Gecko, Snake, and Tree Frog hobbyists. Modular Cork Planters & Gecko Background Kits were also pretty popular with the Gecko keeping community. Other new products included a freshly revised Fly Media, NEHERP Glass Inserts, Custom Background Texture Mix, Vertical Conversion Kits, and tons of new wood decor options. The most popular development was our NEHERP Moss Slurry, which took nearly a year of testing to develop.

At the end of 2015, we started expanding into a new area of the warehouse. Our greenhouse area was tripled, our supply room was doubled, and our "wood room" was an entirely new development. While we were glad to have added a considerable amount of space to the supply-end of things, we were still stuck with a tiny 250sq/ft office for 3 employees (and 17+ vivariums!). We were cramped, to say the least!

As much as I'd like to say things were peachy through the end of 2015, that simply wasn't the case. Shippers began charging exponentially more money per shipment, we had multiple thefts, family members passed away, and more. The truth is, our company had a huge load of stress put on it between mid 2015 & early 2016. During that time, our order processing time approached 2 weeks, and a delay notice needed to be posted on the site. It was an incredibly stressful time for us as a company, and we thank every single client for being so patient during our rough patch. Obviously we made it through the difficult times, but it sure wasn't easy. With the ugly stuff out of the way, let's get back to the good part...

Jess and I were finally married in July of 2015. It sounds like a happy ending, but it gets even better.

2016-Present: New Website, Location, and Baby!
I was able to launch Version 6 of our website (the current one) in January 2016, after months & months of coding. Our little company has managed to get within the top 1-2 search engine results for most vivarium related topics, and I'm thrilled that the new site has been so well received. There are lots of new features to mention, but the most pivotal is probably the Vivarium Builder, and it's supporting Vivarium Kits. We now offer over 170 different vivarium related kits for all 30 of the most common enclosure sizes, making ours the most comprehensive vivarium support website online. We updated our Background Decor Kits (both light & heavy duty), Vivarium Substrate Kits, Lighting Kits, and of course revamped our Complete Kits. Each kit is enclosure specific, and can be custom-tailored around the needs of a specific species. Some kits have different options to customize according to a client's end-goals. In all, there are over 1,000 possible configurations using the Vivarium Building Tool. We're proud of it, and it's already proven to be our most popular store related page since the new site launched. By February 2016, each of the vivarium-related articles was re-written again to include the most up-to-date information, in an effort to offer the best support to our clients.

 

My favorite part of this whole story took place in April of 2016, when Jessica & I welcomed our son Michael Gus into the world. He's terribly cute, and spends every day with us in NEHERP's office.

By early 2017 our staff had grown considerably, and we finished moving to our largest space yet. The new spot allows us to stock nearly twice as many vivarium related products, pull orders with much more efficiency, and has made a significant difference for the team. Also, our office is finally large enough to walk around in, which was a refreshing change to say the least!

From the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our clients for choosing NEHERP over the years. Thank you for allowing me to start this company, and thank you for supporting what we do. Considering that I met Jessica when she came into NEHERP's old store, the incredible truth is this... Without the support of you (our awesome clients), I'd have never met Jess. Without the support of this awesome hobby, our son might not exist. Needless to say, "I owe you one". Jessica and I plan to spend the rest of our careers helping fuel the herp hobby, Zoos, Nature Centers, and Educational Facilities which have done so much for us by supporting our family's business.