The Dutch understanding for pets

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Dobey started out as a cooperative of pet stores that realised the advantages offered by bulk buying. Spurred by emerging competitors, such as for example other pet store chains, supermarkets, garden centres and the Internet, the group decided to change from a buying organisation to a consumer-oriented sales organisation. “In these years we developed into the mid/hard franchise organisation that we are now,” sales manager Gertjan Willems states. “We introduced frequent customer advertising, private labels, automated checkouts and ordering from our own warehouse.” Dobey Retail is a subsidiary of Target Pet Holding, which also owns the Van Ree warehouse in Amsterdam. Apart from the Dobey stores, Van Ree delivers to 300 other pet shops in the Netherlands and has a range of nearly 10 000 products. A full range of food and non-food products can be ordered by the Dobey shops. “Thanks to international cooperation with a wholesaler from Belgium and Germany, we are able to create sufficient volumes to get products directly from the Far East,” Gertjan Willems continues. The company wants to give its franchisees the space to source a limited portion of their range locally. Gertjan Willems does not believe in full hard franchise: “We would ignore the local market circumstances. The reactions of the franchisees to these circumstances determine the success of the shop.” The sales manager regards the input of the franchisees as very important and therefore Dobey Retail and franchisees' representatives meet twelve times a year. Small sizes, high profits The average size of a typical Dobey shop is about 150 m², but the average is increasing: “We also have three shops bigger than 400 m² and more will follow in growth up to an optimised 200 m²,” Gertjan Willems reports. As a specialist shop, Dobey sells a lot of A-brands in food. Besides these brands, the stores sell “Dobey” food and “Techni-Cal” as a semi-private label brand. In the non-food segment, the shops sell some branded goods, but around 75 per cent of the products belong to the semi-private brand “Nobby”, developed approximately four years ago by Dobey/Van Ree, Vadigran (Belgium) and Nobby Pet Shop (Germany). At the moment Dobey has 65 shops. “We want to grow in order to be present all over the Netherlands, which means we need to go to a minimum of at least 100 Dobey shops,” Gertjan Willems continues. “In the last three years we realised growth of six new shops…