Pet Lovers Centre Brand Guidelines: A 1973 Singapore Pet Chain, Burp!, Trustie & Franchises

Two brothers and a shop in Shaw House.

Pet Lovers Centre began in Singapore in 1973. English Wikipedia, citing reports in The Straits Times from 2003 and 2008, says the company was set up by two brothers, Robert Ng Fook Leon and David Ng Fook Choy, and that their first shop was in Shaw House and Centre on Scotts Road, off Orchard Road. The trade magazine Inside Retail Asia gave the same founding year in August 2019, and so did the company’s chief executive, David Ng Whye Tye, in an interview with the trade publication GlobalPETS in March 2024, in which he said his father had started the company in 1973.

In the same interview he said that when the business began there were very few pet shops in Asia, and that keeping a pet was not something many people thought about. He joined the company in 2003. English Wikipedia says the founders’ second generation took charge in 1995, when Robert Ng’s youngest son, Ng Whye Hoe, took over the business with a school friend. In July 2025 the Philippine retailer Robinsons Retail described Whye Hoe Ng as the group managing director of Pet Lovers Centre Singapore.

The company is a private Singapore business, Pet Lovers Centre Pte Ltd, shortened to PLC in the trade press. Its shop name has since spread to Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam and the Philippines, as the dated store counts below show.

House labels, a magazine and a supermarket corner.

Much of what makes a Pet Lovers Centre shop recognisable is its own ranges. English Wikipedia says the company launched Trustie, its brand of pet accessories, in 1980, and Burp!, its food brand, in 1996. Both names turned up on the shelves of a new, smaller format in 2019: when Inside Retail Asia reported the opening of the first Pet Lovers Centre Express on 5 August 2019, it listed Burp! and Trustie among the brands carried there, next to imported names such as Fish4Dogs, Fish4Cats, Applaws and Biogance.

That Express shop was a store-in-store of about 100 square feet inside the FairPrice supermarket at VivoCity, the shopping centre at HarbourFront. Inside Retail Asia reported that it stocked a narrower selection than a standard shop, covering dried and canned food, treats, accessories and toiletries for dogs, cats and small animals, and that later outlets would vary in size with the host supermarket. The magazine said the idea was to let shoppers top up pet supplies during their grocery shopping instead of making a separate trip to a full-size shop. In March 2024 the chief executive told GlobalPETS that the concept with NTUC FairPrice had grown to six stores.

The chain has also published its own title. English Wikipedia says the company issues Petlovers Magazine in Singapore, and that in December 2012 it introduced a mobile app and mobile site with a chat function and the locations of its stores. In the 2024 interview the chief executive said Pet Lovers Centre sold through its own website and through marketplaces including Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, GrabMart and Pandamart, as well as through its shops. English Wikipedia also records a 2012 meet-and-greet in Singapore that the company organised with the television dog trainer Cesar Millan, citing Channel NewsAsia.

He also described how stock moves around the region: food has to go into a warehouse in each country, while other products can be shipped from the company’s central warehouse in Singapore to the smaller markets.

Pet-store chains and their signs.

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.

Franchises, a licence and a regional network.

Pet Lovers Centre grew beyond Singapore partly through other operators. English Wikipedia says the brand was made available for franchising in 2008. In the Philippines the stores are run under licence: Robinsons Retail says it became the exclusive licensee of Pet Lovers Centre there in 2018, and in July 2025 it said it operated 11 stores nationwide. In September 2026 GlobalPETS reported that the chain had opened its 12th Philippine branch, at Opus Mall in Bridgetowne, Quezon City.

Store counts have changed over time, so each is given with its date. In August 2019 Inside Retail Asia reported that Pet Lovers Centre had more than 100 stores in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam. In March 2024 the chief executive told GlobalPETS that the business had grown from seven stores to about 170 across Asia, close to 70 of them in Singapore, and named Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei and the Philippines as its other markets. He said that in Thailand the company usually opens first in shopping centres in cities such as Bangkok.

He told the same publication that Thailand was a hard market for imported brands, because the country produces a great deal of pet food itself and local labels are easier to build there, and that prices in Malaysia have to be set separately from Singapore. Those are his own views, given in a company interview.

For a design guide, Pet Lovers Centre shows how a shop name run by its founders’ family can carry the same sign from a single Scotts Road unit into franchised and licensed stores in several countries. Compare Petbarn, the Australian pet chain, and Petstock, which began as a produce store in Ballarat. For this guide we use a lagoon teal and a mango on shophouse cream with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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