Arcaplanet Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Ligurian Pet Shop, Maxi Zoo Italia and Fressnapf

From one Ligurian shop to an investor-backed chain.

Arcaplanet’s story begins in 1995, when its first shop opened in Liguria, the coastal region around Genoa. The company marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2025: its own magazine, in a July 2025 article, places that first store “in the heart of Liguria,” and the Italian pet-trade site Zampe Libere reported the anniversary in September 2025, giving the same founding year. The business behind the shop signs is the company Agrifarma; Arcaplanet is the name over the door. The Italian private-equity news site BeBeez, writing in July 2024, names Michele Foppiani as the founder who set up the company in 1995 and says he left it in 2022.

For much of its history Arcaplanet grew with the backing of investment funds. According to BeBeez, the private-equity firm Permira took control of the group in April 2016, buying it from Motion Equity Partners. A year later the Pautassi family, which had owned the pet-shop chain Fortesan, and the investment firm Winch came in as minority shareholders after selling Fortesan to the group, the same report says. That move brought a second chain of pet shops under the Agrifarma roof.

The chain’s shops sell food, accessories and care products for dogs, cats and other household animals, the three groups its own website and magazine are organised around. In its July 2025 anniversary article the company describes a concept store on Via Marghera in Milan, which it calls a flagship, with a layout organised by customer needs and a self-service Pet wash area, a format it says it is testing as a model for later stores. Customers collect points on the Arcacard loyalty card, which the company presents as a central part of its brand, and the chain also sells through its own website and app, with home delivery, click and collect and lockers among the options it lists.

Arcaplanet’s visual identity is not documented in independent sources: the company does not publish a typeface or colour specification, and the tones in this guide are our own.

Maxi Zoo Italia and a regulator’s conditions.

The biggest change in Arcaplanet’s shape came with a deal led by the private-equity firm Cinven. BeBeez reports that Agrifarma was sold to Cinven and the German pet retailer Fressnapf by Permira, Winch and the Pautassi family. The plan was to combine Arcaplanet with Maxi Zoo Italia, Fressnapf’s Italian subsidiary, in a new company called Shiba, in which Cinven was to hold the majority and Fressnapf a minority, according to the trade magazine petworldwide in December 2021.

Italy’s competition authority, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, examined the deal closely. In November 2021 it opened an in-depth investigation, petworldwide reported; the authority counted 388 Arcaplanet shops and 136 Maxi Zoo shops in Italy at the time. The investigation ended in March 2022 with approval on conditions, the Italian trade magazine Pet B2B reported on 15 March 2022: the two chains committed to sell between 50 and 70 stores in areas where their shops overlapped, to buyers that the authority itself would have to approve as independent operators already working in pet retail. The pet-industry trade site GlobalPETS reported the same outcome later that month.

Cinven acquired its majority stake in 2022 and combined the two businesses, the trade magazine Pet Business World reported in July 2024. The rebranding followed quickly. By early December 2022 every former Maxi Zoo Italia shop carried the Arcaplanet sign, matching the stores Agrifarma already owned, Pet B2B reported on 2 December 2022. In the same report the magazine counted 78 Arcaplanet stores in Piedmont, 45 in Veneto and 40 in the metropolitan area of Rome after a round of new openings in Turin, Rome and the province of Vicenza.

The group also changed its management. According to BeBeez, Nicolò Galante became chief executive in April 2022, the same year the founder stepped away, and by July 2024 the network had grown to about 560 stores in Italy with around 3,000 employees.

Shopfronts, owners and formats.

Pet-store chains present themselves above all through the shopfront: a sign that has to read from a retail park, a high street or a shopping-centre corridor, and a logo repeated on loyalty cards, carrier bags, delivery apps and, increasingly, shop-in-shops inside other retailers. For chains that began online, the website and the app do the work of the sign. Tiendanimal, for example, started as an online shop in Málaga in 2006 and opened its first physical store there in 2012, according to Spanish trade press.

Ownership shapes these brands as much as design does. Many chains have passed from their founders to private-equity investors, family offices or larger retail groups, and some now sit beside former rivals under one parent. Arcaplanet, founded in Liguria in 1995, passed through several investors before the German Fressnapf group completed its takeover in December 2024, RetailDetail reported; in Spain, Tiendanimal and Kiwoko have shared an owner, the Peruvian Mulder family’s Emefin, since 2020, and trade under the IskayPet group name. Corporate pages on founders and owners are often the plainest record of these changes, and this guide states each owner with a date.

Store formats vary widely: large out-of-town units, small city shops, grooming salons, clinics run under separate names, and corners inside DIY or farm-supply stores. Networks change quickly, so every store or country count in these guides is given with its date and its source. Own-label ranges, mascots and loyalty schemes are named only as the companies name them.

The chains and online retailers in this group come from Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. Each guide sets out what can be checked — who founded the business, who owns it now and how its network is published — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and type in each guide are our unofficial interpretation, not the companies’ own.

Part of the Fressnapf group since December 2024.

In July 2024 Arcaplanet’s ownership changed again. Cinven agreed to sell its stake to Fressnapf, which would become the sole owner of the Italian chain, and in a separate transaction Cinven agreed to invest in the Fressnapf group as a minority shareholder, BeBeez and Pet Business World reported at the time. The deal needed regulatory approval. RetailDetail reported on 6 December 2024 that Fressnapf had completed the acquisition after the European Commission approved it, adding more than 560 Italian stores to the German group. Arcaplanet kept its own name and signs under the new owner, as its own magazine and the trade press continued to show in 2025 and 2026.

The chain has continued to add stores by buying smaller regional businesses and by working with other retailers. In June 2026 it bought Animal Store, a pet chain with twelve shops in Calabria, which continue to trade under their existing name, GlobalPETS reported on 18 June 2026; the same report put Arcaplanet’s network at more than 600 locations in Italy and its workforce at about 3,000. In the same month Arcaplanet signed a partnership with Bricofer Group, a DIY retailer, covering Arcaplanet stores and fully branded Arcaplanet corners inside Bricofer, Self and Ottimax outlets, with the corners run by Bricofer’s own staff, the retail weekly Gdoweek reported on 10 June 2026. The Retail Institute Italy described the first stage of that agreement on 11 June 2026 as fifteen stores and eight corners across 23 DIY centres. The company’s magazine has since announced Arcaplanet openings in partnership with Bricofer in Turin, Macerata and Nerviano.

The company gave its own figures at its thirtieth anniversary: 596 pet stores and more than 3,000 staff, according to its July 2025 article. Delivery through the Glovo and Deliveroo apps sits beside its own website and app, and the Arcacard remains the thread that ties shop, site and app together in the company’s own description.

For a design guide, Arcaplanet shows how a regional pet shop’s name can survive several changes of owner and absorb a rival chain’s stores under one sign. Compare Fressnapf, its owner since December 2024, and Tiendanimal, a Spanish chain that also grew under investor ownership. For this guide we use slate, warm ochre and sea glass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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