Pet Care Services

Pet care services refer to a wide variety of pet services sold to consumers, focusing on veterinary, boarding, daycare, grooming, training and pet sitting/walking, but also identifying major trends in other service areas including pet waste management, pet travel and pet funerary/bereavement.

Reflecting the marketwide trend toward multiservice facilities, increasingly characterizing the pet care services market is a significant degree of overlap between the various kinds of channels and service providers in terms of services offered.

For example, most boarding kennels also offer pet grooming either as a complimentary service (i.e., so the animal will not smell like the kennel when it is picked up by its owner) or as an add-on service, while many groomers also provide daycare and limited boarding services, as do some pet sitters, who may also offer selected grooming services in addition to dog walking. Also, some services are provided through pet specialty retail outlets, most notably PetSmart and Petco; while certain services—such as dog training and pet sitting—are not restricted to any channel but rather performed in varying locations including pet owners’ own homes.

Veterinary services continue to expand at a healthy clip, driven by technological and pharmaceutical advances, largely setting the pace for the overall market. Second, thanks mainly to the activities of PetSmart and Petco during the past decade or so, pet services have become integrated into big-box retail in a way not seen prior to their market involvement, ensuring daily ongoing shopper exposure to veterinary, grooming and training services that drives sales to new and repeat customers and supports the notion of pet services as a vital and readily available part of one’s pet care routine. Third, the range of available pet care services continues to expand into underdeveloped or new types, a trend fueled by high-energy entrepreneurs and franchise outfits with national aspirations, tapping into such fertile areas as mobile grooming, pet sitting and walking, waste removal, travel and funerary/bereavement.