Keeping dogs occupied

Next year it will be 20 years since the dynamic Swede made her first activity toys, loaded up her camper van and began driving around trying to convince dog owners of the advantages of keeping their pets meaningfully occupied. Looking back now, Nina Ottosson declares that it took nearly ten years before her efforts at persuasion really bore fruit. “The global market for activity toys is growing strongly,” reports the energetic entrepreneur. Dog owners are fast beginning to realise that they can do their pets some good. It is only in a number of eastern and southeast European countries and some Asian countries that the understanding of dog-owning is still not sufficiently developed to be able to launch a range of activity toys there. The exceptions to this are South Korea, the conurbations in China, and Hong Kong in particular. Considerable interest is now also being shown in Russia and Poland. After her domestic market of Scandinavia, the US market is Nina Ottosson’s biggest customer, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. She believes these countries in particular still harbour great potential, which is why she is concentrating her activities here above all. Battle against copies “Success brought copycat products too, however,” says Nina Ottosson regretfully. Above all, pet product companies in the USA and Germany are the ones which now unscrupulously copy her products, have them made in China and then sell them cheaply. Nina Ottosson has engaged a number of lawyers, who take strong action against copies that are too blatant. “The main problem with the copies is that they are mostly manufactured from inferior materials, which harm dogs instead of benefiting them when playing and can even injure them,” she stresses. While she uses exclusively high-quality woods from Scandinavia in her own wooden products, many copies in the Far East consist of cheap woods. The same goes for the plastic products: the material blends in the Ottosson products are soft and don’t split, but that is not the case with many copies, she says. A question of material Nina Ottosson’s range is split equally into wooden and plastic products. Closest to her heart are the wooden products, which are nearly all produced at the company’s headquarters in Sweden by seven staff. The plastic products are becoming more popular with the customers, however, which is down to the unusual ideas that the entrepreneur comes up with. “Most of the plastic games can be used as a…