The pet supplies trade in Montreal

With a population of over 1.6 million, Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and the biggest city in the francophone province of Quebec. The number of inhabitants in the conurbation of Montreal as a whole is estimated at more than 3.8 million. Montreal is French-speaking, and the majority of the population is francophone. It is said that natives of Montreal like to go out to eat well, have a feeling for the finer things in life and love life. Retail companies that want to be successful in the Montreal area must show that they have taste and offer attractive product presentations in their stores. They also need to take the special features of the pro­vince of Quebec into consideration: every product sold here must be in bilingual packaging. That deters many a big commercial enterprise in the pet sector, such as PetSmart and Petco, from operating its own stores in the province, which is known to be idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of competition in the Montreal conurbation. The individual speciality chains often operate stores in the same locations, in large retail parks and shopping malls with a high footfall, where they are frequently only a few hundred metres apart. This stokes up the price war considerably, especially with regard to pet food. The pet store chains are far from being the only vendors of pet products. All the big mass merchandisers, especially Wal-Mart, stock a large range of pet food and accessory products and still account for the lion’s share of the sales cake for pet food, in spite of the growing strength of the speciality trade. Safari There are plenty of pet supplies chains in the Montreal area. The Safari Group is one of the smaller chains with nine stores. It may be small, but the stores are heaving at weekends. They exert a magical pull on many children in particular, and no wonder: visit­ing a Safari store is like an expedition to a land of adventure. Robert Mullen, who started the retail chain and has built it up in stages, has picked up a lot of his ideas from Walt Disney World in the USA, of which he is a ­passionate fan. He has implemented these ideas in his Safari stores. The focus is undoubtedly on the shopping experience, and there is probably nowhere in the world that presents pets as imaginatively as here. Every Safari store is presented differently, and this is the reason for the huge success that the company enjoys in the Montreal conurbation and elsewhere. (The next issue of PET worldwide will…