Animates Brand Guidelines: A 1996 Christchurch Pet Store, Yellow Walls & a Trans-Tasman JV

One store, then a national chain.

Animates is a New Zealand chain of pet-supply stores. Its owner EBOS Group says the business grew from the opening of its first store in Christchurch in 1996, and describes it as a specialty pet retail brand with stores throughout the country. The same date and city came from the company itself in the regional press: in May 2018 the Northern Advocate quoted an Animates marketing manager saying the business had started in Christchurch in 1996 and had been growing ever since, and describing it as a New Zealand-operated company.

By the middle of the 2010s the chain was national. In June 2016 the Whanganui Chronicle, reporting that Animates would open in the city, called it one of the country’s largest pet shop brands and gave its size as about 40 stores nationwide. The same paper repeated that count in February 2017, when the Whanganui store, on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Dublin Street in a building that had housed a charity shop, was days from a soft opening.

The company’s ownership is shared across the Tasman. EBOS Group, the listed healthcare and animal-care group, records in its own history timeline that in 2012 it acquired the pet-products business Masterpet, established in 1954, and at the same time acquired 50 per cent of the Animates pet store group. EBOS still says that Masterpet holds a half share of Animates NZ, and that the chain trades as a joint venture with the Australian retailer Petbarn.

The other half belongs to Petbarn’s parent. English Wikipedia says that in 2014 the Australian pet care company Greencross acquired Mammoth Pet Holdings, the parent of the Petbarn chain in Australia and the Animates chain in New Zealand, and describes Animates today as a fifty-fifty joint venture with EBOS Group. In August 2018 the New Zealand business news service BusinessDesk described Greencross as a joint owner of Animates that was continuing to open in-store vet clinics in New Zealand.

Superstores with services inside.

Animates presents itself as a large-format pet store rather than a corner shop. EBOS says the founders’ aim was a “true pet superstore,” and lists what the chain sells: food, toys, kennels, hutches, cages and tanks, and grooming products, along with in-store advice. Its own website sorts the range by animal, with separate sections for animals including fish, small pets and reptiles, and the Northern Advocate reported in 2018 that the business covered dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, fish, rabbits and other small pets.

Services sit inside the stores. When Animates announced a store for Whangārei in May 2018, the Northern Advocate reported that it would include a grooming salon and a do-it-yourself dog wash, and noted that the nearest existing branch, at Silverdale north of Auckland, offered a dog wash, pet adoptions and a vet service. The Whanganui store described by the Whanganui Chronicle in 2016 was planned the same way, with grooming and a self-service dog wash. Leashed pets, the company told the Northern Advocate, are welcome to come shopping too.

The vet side has grown in step with Greencross. BusinessDesk reported in August 2018 that the Australian group was continuing to add in-store vet clinics in New Zealand, and the Animates website now carries a Vetcare section alongside its shop. Those clinics are a service the company offers in its stores; this guide makes no claim about them.

Online, the chain sells through its own website with home delivery, a Repeat Delivery subscription for regular orders, and a Petpoints loyalty programme that customers join when they create an Animates account, according to the site.

How pet-supply retailers present themselves.

Pet-supply retailers present themselves first through the store. Many trade from large out-of-town units described as superstores, where food, bedding, toys and aquarium or small-animal supplies run down long aisles under plain category signs. Several chains have added services under the same roof: grooming salons, vet clinics and training, each often with its own name that sits beside the main shop name on the fascia and in the aisles.

Naming follows the same pattern. Chains tend to keep one short shop name and add own-label ranges with names of their own, so a single store can carry the retailer’s brand, its food and accessory ranges and many outside makers side by side. In the UK, for example, Pets at Home dates its Wainwright’s food range to 2007, and trade reports of Jollyes have named its K9, Lifestage and Raw and Simple ranges. When a chain unifies these names, as Pets at Home did in 2023, the change is usually reported in the design and retail press.

Loyalty clubs and online shops are the other public face. Retailers publish membership schemes for regular buyers, such as Pets at Home’s VIP club, launched in 2012 according to the company, alongside websites with click-and-collect, delivery and repeat-order options. Shelf prices, promotions and member offers are presented in the stores and online, and change often, so a design guide describes how they are shown rather than what they are.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate and investor pages. These usually give a founding story, the current owner and any stock-market listing, and many chains in this category have passed between private-equity owners before or after a listing. This guide sets out what dated sources say about each company’s founders, owners and listings, and treats the companies’ own descriptions as their claims.

A yellow building you notice from the road.

The most visible part of the Animates identity is the colour of its buildings. In October 2018 the Northern Advocate reported that about two-thirds of the Whangārei building had been painted yellow, with a sign announcing that Animates would be opening soon; the store went into the former Toyota building on Carruth Street, a two-storey site opposite a supermarket that had stood largely unused since 2014. The year before, the Whanganui Chronicle had described the new store on Victoria Avenue as a bright yellow building that had been hard to miss while it went up.

Its owners describe it in plain terms: EBOS calls it a specialty pet retail brand; RNZ, reporting in April 2025 on EBOS’s purchase of the veterinary supplier SVS, described EBOS as the animal and health care company behind the well-known pet shop Animates.

The name stays the same across the country even though the ownership sits in two other companies. Greencross keeps the Petbarn name in Australia and Greencross Vets for its clinics, and EBOS keeps Masterpet for its products, while the New Zealand stores carry only the Animates name.

The chain’s published history is short and mostly told by the company and its owners. The dates that can be checked are the Christchurch start in 1996, EBOS’s half share from 2012, Greencross’s arrival through the Mammoth Pet Holdings purchase in 2014 and the count of about 40 stores reported in 2016 and 2017.

For a design guide, Animates shows how a single strong colour on a building can carry a retail brand from one town to the next. Compare its joint-venture sibling Petbarn and the British chain Pets at Home. For this guide we use a storefront yellow, slate and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Animates’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.