Industry Update | Pet Retailers Accelerate Store Expansion Across Four Continents

Pet specialty retailers are opening physical stores at pace across Europe, Asia, Oceania and North America, according to reporting by Global Pet Industry this week. Taken together, the announcements point to a sector still investing heavily in shelf space — and in the own-brand ranges that fill it.

Europe

Fressnapf | Maxi Zoo opened a new urban-format store in Paris, its 500th in France and the 3,000th in the group’s European network. France added more than 60 stores in 2025 and now sits alongside Italy and Poland at the centre of the group’s expansion. The group opened 195 stores in 2025 and plans more than 150 in 2026. Fressnapf | Maxi Zoo is a long-standing Sunnypet customer.

ZooRoyal, part of REWE Group, announced eight new specialist stores in Germany, beginning with Halle by the end of 2026 and continuing through 2027 in Bielefeld, Heppenheim, Hildesheim, Leipzig, Mannheim and Osnabrück. The retailer also operates 89 shop-in-shop pet departments across REWE and TOOM locations, with plans to extend the format much further.

Asia and Oceania

In India, Heads Up For Tails opened four new stores in September across Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, combining retail with spa services. Founder Rashi Narang has set a target of at least 250 stores by the end of 2027, up from more than 100 today.

In Australia and New Zealand, Petstock passed 250 locations with two further openings in Victoria and Queensland.

North America

Pet Supplies Plus added stores in Florida and Georgia, taking its network past 725 locations. Tractor Supply, which operated 2,463 stores across 49 states as of June, opened two more in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Hollywood Feed opened in Texas and Louisiana, reaching 36 stores in Texas alone. Grooming-led formats are growing in parallel, with Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming now above 350 locations and Scenthound and Skiptown both adding sites.

What this means from the factory floor

Store growth of this kind translates directly into demand at our end of the chain. New formats — particularly the smaller urban stores Fressnapf and ZooRoyal are rolling out — change what a product has to be: compact on the shelf, efficient in the carton, quick to assemble, and consistent across hundreds of locations.

That is the brief we work to. Sunnypet manufactures wooden pet housing and sewn pet goods in Xiamen, flat-packed and developed to each retailer’s own specification, and the questions we are asked most often now are about packing density, container utilisation and assembly time — not just unit price.

Source: Global Pet Industry, “From retail to grooming: Pet players expand store networks,” 8 October 2026.