No Pong: From startup to multinational business with WooCommerce

No Pong is one of the most popular natural deodorant brands in Australia. They launched on WooCommerce in 2015, and have since grown from a single product to an international business with over 200 SKUs across three core markets. 

Their growth in popularity was supported by pivotal changes to their ecommerce infrastructure, switching hosts and adding resources as they were needed — a benefit that SaaS platforms can’t provide. 

We recently chatted with Melanie McVean and Chris Caley, co-founders of No Pong, to learn more about the business and their success.

• 200+ active SKUs that include simple products, bundles, subscriptions, and wholesale products; add or update products every few months.
• Use a mix of marketplace and custom extensions for CX, logistics, and marketing.
• Sell to Australia, Canada, and the US.

The company began in 2015 when Melanie, who had been making her own deodorant, gave some to her husband, Chris, for a surf competition. Impressed by how well the homemade product worked, Chris and Melanie decided, then and there, to turn it into a business.

Not long after, they launched on WooCommerce with one product sold in singles or as a subscription. They now have their own warehouse in Australia, offer 11 different products (with 200+ active SKUs), and support both their D2C and wholesale customers with a team of 20.

No Pong has become a household name in Australia, having achieved 63% brand awareness among deodorant users based on a recent YouGov survey.* No Pong is widely available around Australia through D2C ecommerce, online marketplaces, and third-party retail. They also manufacture in Canada for the North American market.

*All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov. Total sample size was 1000 adults. Field work was undertaken between December 12th and 16th of 2025. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all Australian adults (aged 18+).

No Pong has made full use of WooCommerce’s versatility, flexibility, and scalability. They started small and then upgraded resources and capabilities as needed — a boon to both financials and the customer experience.

No Pong chose WooCommerce in 2015 because they could get their site up and running quickly (“literally 24 hours”) at a very low cost in order to validate whether they had a viable business idea.

As the business grew, they stayed with WooCommerce due to its composable nature.

“WooCommerce has afforded us a great deal of flexibility with our tech stack. Every major ecommerce integration is supported, as are all of the logistics, fulfillment, and inventory management integrations we use,” said Melanie.

“In the rare event we need to connect something that’s a little more custom, we’ve always been able to find a way. We’ve yet to hit a hard ‘computer says no’ compatibility issue which is definitely a major benefit in terms of flexibility.”

“With WooCommerce, literally anything is possible.”

— Chris Caley, Co-founder, No Pong

Growth challenges came quickly, and SaaS wasn’t the answer

By 2017, they had outgrown their initial setup. In 2018, they launched in Canada, and considered migrating to other platforms to support their growth. 

After evaluating both Shopify and BigCommerce over a two-year period, they met Saucal, a certified Woo Agency Partner — and “one of the truly transformational points in our business journey.” 

“We spent a huge amount of time, money, and resources doing due diligence on Shopify and BigCommerce, only to find ourselves back at WooCommerce,” Melanie shared.

“We found the other platforms highly restrictive and expensive, with cart and checkout experiences that we didn’t feel were best-in-class.”

— Chris Caley, Co-founder, No Pong

Chris and Melanie were also put off by the SaaS platforms’ substantially higher cost for features like shipping tables and subscriptions. For businesses selling low-cost products, the percentage fee per order is untenable. 

Rather than migrating platforms, they switched their hosting to Kinsta in 2019. The additional resources immediately gave them smoother scalability and better site stability.

In 2021, No Pong completed a full site redesign to improve speed and performance, and then migrated to WordPress VIP hosting in 2022 for even better speed, performance, and scalability. 

Chris and Melanie attribute much of their success to a persistent focus on quality. They’ve kept many business functions in-house rather than outsourcing to third parties to ensure quality remained high. 

“Any time you have a dependency on a third party, there is a risk that when they go down, we all go down together,” Chris noted. “Bringing some of those functions in-house has allowed us to not only raise the bar, but also to raise our level of control over the outcomes we’re aiming for.”

On the technical side, the benefits of flexible, high-quality hosting and infrastructure are clear.

“The first versions of our site were hosted on cheap, shared hosting services that really weren’t suited to a scaling order volumes and databases. Our sites are now hosted on WordPress VIP, and can absolutely take anything we, or our customers, throw at them.”

The flexibility WooCommerce has provided means that No Pong can be flexible too — which is crucial for financial and technical viability through periods of growth. “We are constantly revising and renewing our processes. The simple reason is that every time you scale by an order of magnitude, you basically have to throw out all your systems and processes and find new ones.”

The team is consistently working to ensure that their website is a destination that customers return to. In 2026, they’re working on another site redesign to improve the mobile experience,  restructuring the site to improve conversion rates, and building some fun UI/UX features that reward user behavior.

Now and always, No Pong focuses on making products that their customers love while providing exceptional customer service along the way. 

“Having that trust, credibility, and support from our customers is one of the ways we feel we can future-proof ourselves against the inevitable tide of change.”

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.