Pets
In Marker. More on Medium.
After Covid-19, big retailers now own 90% of the online pet food market. Can a new organization help small pet shops hang on?
As the cold darkness of winter set in and the calendar flipped to a second year of Covid life, Kaite Giordano, a fourth-grade teacher in New York City and the mother of seven-year-old James, made a major decision. To break free from the doldrums, their Brooklyn household needed to expand.
And so James got a new bestie: Chewie, a Cavapoo named after everyone’s favorite Wookie—not the online pet supply juggernaut. Although Giordano had never owned a dog before and wasn’t really a pet person, she thought a four-legged friend was just what the family needed. “The loneliness and isolation of…
The $99 billion pet-retail economy is booming, thanks to a surge in pandemic puppies and kittens: Chewy’s shares have more than doubled since the start of the year, Petco rebranded itself as a health and wellness company ahead of its IPO, and dog-supplies startup, BarkBox, recently announced it would go public in a $1.6 billion deal.
As Minyoung Lee wrote in The Bold Italic, the majority of America’s pet parents are millennials who find comfort and stability in their “fur children” after experiencing a series of economic setbacks. “We own less than 5% of the country’s wealth, starting our adult…
Number of the Day
Fraudsters have swindled $3 million from people looking for animal companionship during the pandemic
3,969: That’s the number of pet-related fraud reports the Better Business Bureau received this year through November, projected to go up to 4,300 by the end of the year. Together, the reported scams swindled more than $3 million from would-be pet adopters, six times the total losses reported in 2017.
Demand for pets has surged during the pandemic, with adoption shelters and pet breeders saying they have more interest than they can handle. Scammers have been quick to take advantage of people’s willingness to pay higher prices and deal with less-reputed vendors to bring home a pet. …
Between the Lines
There’s an opportunity to build a U.S. insurance business that actually prices according to risk
The American health insurance market looks nothing like what you’d design if you were starting from scratch. The dominant payment scheme — employer-provided health care — is literally a vestige of regulatory arbitrage allowing companies to evade wage controls in World War II.
If you’ve ever wanted to redesign health insurance from scratch, good news! Pet health insurance operates under a completely different regulatory regime, and we’re in the early days of the market — the very early days, with pet insurance penetration in the United States close to 1%.
There are several reasons to expect the pet insurance market…
