Animalis Brand Guidelines: The 1998 French Pet Chain From the Truffaut Fold to Emefin

A pet chain born beside the garden centres.

Animalis is a French chain of pet supply stores. It was founded in 1998: the German-published trade magazine PET worldwide reported in November 2018 that the chain was celebrating its 20th anniversary that year, and the regional business site Lyon Entreprises gave the same founding year in 2025. For most of its history it belonged to the Belgian retail group Louis Delhaize, whose businesses included Cora and the Truffaut garden centre chain, which made Animalis a sister business to Truffaut.

The link to Truffaut ran through people as well as ownership. PET worldwide wrote in 2014 that the chain’s general director, Jean-Philippe Darnault, was a former managing director of Truffaut and the founder of Animalis, and that he had returned to run it in 2013.

The chain grew through a merger with another pet retailer. In early 2004 PET worldwide described the business as Animalis-1000 Amis, part of the Truffaut group, formed when the Truffaut subsidiary Animalis took over the chain 1000 Amis. It then had 30 stores, 17 of them around Paris and four around Bordeaux, run from a head office at Évry. Its format was the large specialist store in dense urban areas, stocking more than nine thousand products.

In 2014 the same magazine counted 40 stores, with ranges of up to twenty thousand items covering every common kind of pet, including poultry, which it noted was widely kept in France. In November 2018 it put the network at around 42 stores in France, plus an online shop.

A glass tower, then a colour for every pet.

Animalis has used its buildings to stand out. In early 2004 PET worldwide reported a new three-thousand-square-metre flagship at Herblay, near Paris, in the Patte d’Oie shopping centre, a short distance from a Truffaut garden centre run by the same parent. The store was crowned by a round glass tower on its façade, lit at night in many colours and visible from a distance. Inside were a large koi pond with fountains and lighting, an artificial rock wall and trees, and an aquarium area finished in black.

A decade later the chain redesigned its shops around easier navigation. In 2014 PET worldwide described a new sales and presentation concept, introduced by then at Clermont-Ferrand, Bordeaux and Fresnes near Paris. Product groups were laid out so that a shopper could see the whole floor from the entrance, and a colour-coding system gave each pet category its own colour, with large background pictures of animals in natural settings. Check-outs were turned so that staff faced customers as they came in, letting cashiers greet each shopper on arrival; Darnault told the magazine the old layout, with cashiers’ backs to the door, was not a warm welcome.

Animalis has also tried smaller sites. In September 2021 PET worldwide reported a 188-square-metre shop in a Cora shopping centre in Metz, the third store in its small-format concept and bigger than the two before it, selling only pet food and accessories. Recent openings are far smaller than the Herblay flagship: the one that opened in October 2025 at Saint-Alban-Leysse in Savoie has 420 square metres, Lyon Entreprises reported, and the one that opened in October 2026 at Villenave-d’Ornon, south of Bordeaux, has 650 square metres, according to Le Journal des Entreprises.

Both reports describe the shops by animal: cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, rodents and fish, each with its own area, with named suppliers including Royal Canin, Hill’s, Trixie and Beaphar.

Pet retail and its brands.

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.

From Louis Delhaize to a Peruvian family group.

The chain changed hands at the end of 2020. PET worldwide reported on 1 December 2020, citing the French retail trade magazine LSA, that Louis Delhaize had sold Animalis to the Peruvian investment group Emefin with effect from the beginning of 2021, so that the seller could concentrate on groceries, e-commerce and garden centres. Animalis then ran 40 large stores in France, and Darnault, its president, was to stay on.

Emefin was already a pet retailer. The same report said it was active mainly in South America, Spain and Italy, and owned the Spanish chains Kiwoko and Tiendanimal. In September 2021 PET worldwide again described Emefin as a family holding company that also owned Tiendanimal.

Under the new owner the network grew quickly. Lyon Entreprises reported in November 2025 that the shop opened on 24 October 2025 at Saint-Alban-Leysse took Animalis past 100 stores, its eleventh in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. In October 2026 Le Journal des Entreprises, citing LSA, said Animalis had 40 stores when Emefin took over and reached its hundredth after 30 openings in twelve months; the Villenave-d’Ornon store was its tenth in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Both reports name Frédéric Le Guen as president of Animalis, and the company’s own website lists him as chairman and chief executive.

Animalis also sells online at animalis.com alongside its stores. Its website describes a brand 25 years in the making and centres its message on advice for pet owners and on training its in-store advisers.

For a design guide, Animalis shows how a specialist chain can grow out of a garden-centre group and carry its retail habits with it: big signature buildings first, then clear colour-coded floors and smaller city shops. Compare Kiwoko, the Spanish chain under the same owner, and Fressnapf, the German pet chain whose stores trade abroad as Maxi Zoo. For this guide we use deep teal, oat and mustard with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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