A brother and sister in the province of Vicenza, and a van full of handmade cages.

Ferplast is an Italian maker of pet accessories with its headquarters in Castelgomberto, in the province of Vicenza in the Veneto. The trade magazine PET worldwide, marking the company’s fiftieth anniversary in its fifth issue of 2016, reported that Ferplast began in a basement in 1966. It named the founders as Carlo Vaccari, then still the company’s president, and his sister Caterina Vaccari, then its vice-president, and described the business as starting out as a manufacturer of birdcages.

The Italian news agency AGI told the same story from another angle on 18 June 2016. It reported that Carlo Vaccari began with handmade birdcages, which he sold around Italy from a Fiat 238 van. By the time of that report, the founder remained president while his son, Nicola Vaccari, was chief executive, and PET worldwide noted that the company was by then run by the second generation of the family. The anniversary itself was celebrated at the Castelgomberto headquarters, which the magazine said was a way for the family to thank the people who had believed in the company and supported its growth.

AGI described Castelgomberto as increasingly the company’s headquarters and its centre for research and development, marketing and logistics, even as production spread abroad. The product list it gave by 2016 had moved a long way from the first cages: a lead with a magnetic clasp, a cat flap activated by a pet’s microchip, a retractable lead with customisable covers, and designer cushions for dogs and cats.

The anniversary year also showed how the company presented itself in public. At Interzoo 2016 in Nuremberg, PET worldwide reported, Ferplast designed its stand to give most of its space to conviviality, in keeping with what the magazine called a company value: the relationship with its customers.

Italy, Slovakia and Ukraine, with the Italian label used as a calling card.

Where Ferplast products are made is set out in the 2016 coverage. AGI reported that part of the company’s production moved to Ukraine in 2000 and that a plant in Slovakia opened in 2005. PET worldwide described the company that same year as working from three production plants, in Italy, Slovakia and Ukraine, with Castelgomberto as the head office. The Italian base remained central to how the company presented itself: asked by AGI whether being Italian helped, the company answered that it certainly did, calling it a fine calling card that it always played at international trade fairs.

The same report listed the countries where Ferplast had its own sales branches, among them France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Benelux, Poland, Russia, Brazil and China, with the newest in the United States, in New Jersey. The company told AGI that it wanted to expand strongly in South America and to grow its position in the US market in the following years, and that it had begun selling online in Italy and, from May 2016, in Germany.

Water came into the range in the 2000s. PET worldwide reported in July 2021 that Ferplast had sold its own aquarium assortment since 2004, which it intended to expand significantly. That aquatics business would become the reason for the company’s most visible change of brand architecture, when it bought an established aquarium name and decided to put its whole aquatics range under it.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are pet accessory names, five of them European and one American: Trixie, Karlie, Kerbl, Ferplast, Beeztees and Tuffy. Pet accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to wholesalers that supply shops under several labels, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a village pet shop to a garden centre or a farm store.

A pet accessory brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single collar or toy than by a catalogue, a name and the packaging that hangs on a shop wall, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its warehouses or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two Italian acquisitions and a new home for the aquatics range.

Ferplast has stayed in the hands of the family that founded it in 1966, and it has grown by buying other Italian makers. PET worldwide reported on 26 January 2021 that at the end of 2020 Ferplast had acquired Marchioro, which it described as a former competitor, from the Marp Group, taking over its plant, machinery and moulds. Ferplast called the deal a strategic step of great importance.

The second purchase was in aquatics. On 6 July 2021 the same magazine reported that Ferplast had acquired Hydor Srl of Bassano del Grappa and Hydor USA Inc. of Sacramento. Hydor had been founded in 1984 by Mr Bresolin and designed and produced aquarium filters, pumps and heaters. Ferplast said it intended to keep the Hydor brand alive and relaunch its production and distribution, that Hydor’s jobs would be retained, and its chief executive, Nicola Vaccari, said he was pleased to expand the aquatics business further. In November 2021, PET worldwide reported that Ferplast planned to present its entire aquatics range under the Hydor umbrella brand, combining the two ranges, with the new programme set to premiere at Interzoo in Nuremberg. The magazine said the Hydor purchase had considerably expanded Ferplast’s aquatics assortment, and the plan gave that side of the business a separate identity from the Ferplast name.

For a design guide, Ferplast shows how a family maker that started with handmade birdcages built a broad accessories brand while keeping research, marketing and logistics in its home town, and how it chose to split off an acquired name for one category rather than absorb it. Compare flexi, the German retractable-lead maker, and Trixie, the German pet-supply house. For this guide we use cage orange, lagoon blue and deep navy with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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