A New Jersey company built online around cat furniture.

PetFusion is an American pet products brand best known for its cat furniture and cardboard scratchers. When the private equity trade title PE Professional reported its sale on 17 July 2019, it described PetFusion as an online seller of dog and cat products, including cat furniture, dog beds, litter solutions and toys. The same report said the company was based in Fanwood, New Jersey, had been founded in 2010, and sold mainly through e-commerce rather than through bricks-and-mortar pet shops.

That online focus runs through the brand’s documented history, and when PetFusion was bought, the buyer singled out its knowledge of that channel. The trade report named three PetFusion executives — Andrew Roost, Ted Elliott and Kevin Krueger — and said they would join the buyer’s executive team and lead its e-commerce channel strategy. In other words, the acquiring group was buying not only a catalogue of scratchers and beds but also the people who had built a brand online, and it gave them responsibility for that side of the wider business.

From an independent online seller to a Kansas platform.

The buyer was Cosmic Pet, a pet products group headquartered in Wichita, Kansas. PE Professional explained that Cosmic Pet was a portfolio company of Guardian Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, that makes control investments in lower middle-market companies. Guardian had formed the platform in January 2016 by acquiring certain assets of Rose America, which traded as Hyper Pet. The platform then grew by acquisition: Hyper Pet bought R2P Pet of Pleasanton, California, in January 2019, and OurPet’s of Fairport Harbor, Ohio, in March 2019, after which Hyper Pet was renamed Cosmic Pet. PetFusion was its fourth add-on. Because the OurPet’s deal and the change of name had come only that spring, PetFusion joined a group that had been trading as Cosmic Pet for a matter of months.

The report listed the brands Cosmic Pet already sold at the time, including Hyper Pet, Pet Zone, OurPet’s, Aussie Naturals, Wild Eats, Ultra Paws and Mad Cat. PetFusion brought an online-first cat furniture range into that mix. Cosmic Pet’s chief executive, Tim Blurton, said of the PetFusion team, “Its leadership team brings deep, valuable insight into the pet industry and the e-commerce channel,” according to PE Professional. Peter Haabestad, Guardian’s co-founder and managing partner and Cosmic Pet’s chairman, was quoted as saying, “Guardian believes in Cosmic Pet as an outstanding platform company.” The report added that CIBC had provided senior financing for the acquisition and that DLA Piper had acted as legal adviser to Cosmic Pet and Guardian.

PetFusion kept its own name inside Cosmic Pet, and it was still listed as a separate brand when the group changed hands again two years later.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make furniture, scratchers, toys or other accessories for cats. Cat accessory brands in general sit at many different points in the pet trade, from small workshops run by their founders to names that now belong to much larger pet companies or investment groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialty pet shop to an online marketplace.

A cat accessory brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a name, a mark, its packaging and the way its range is organised and described, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond its first workshop or catalogue. 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 range and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Folded into Petmate under Platinum Equity.

The second change of ownership came on 25 October 2021. In a release dated that day in Los Angeles, Platinum Equity announced that it had acquired Cosmic Pet and would combine it with Petmate, a company it already owned. The release named Pet Fusion — written as two words — among Cosmic Pet’s brands, alongside Hyper Pet, OurPet’s, Pet Zone, Aussie Naturals, Wild Eats, Pet Craft Supply Co, Ultra Paws, Mad Cat and Mega Mutt. It described Cosmic Pet as a designer, marketer and distributor of pet products — toys, beds, collars, leashes, treats, feeders, bowls and other accessories — founded in 1986 and headquartered in Wichita, and said its Wichita operations would remain an important part of the combined network.

Petmate, the other half of the combination, was described in the same release as having been founded in 1959 as Doskocil Manufacturing, Inc. and headquartered in Arlington, Texas. Platinum Equity had acquired it in September 2021. Its brands at the time included Chuckit!, Pet Qwerks, Healthy Chews, Gamma2, JW and La-Z-Boy. The buyer itself was introduced in the release as a global investment firm founded in 1995 by Tom Gores; it used BMO Capital Markets as financial adviser and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Alston & Bird as legal advisers on the deal. The release said Petmate’s chief executive, Alice Tillett, would lead the combined company. Since 2021, therefore, PetFusion has sat inside a much larger group which the release said manufactured, sourced and marketed plastic and wire kennels, dog houses, toys, food storage, bedding, treats and chews, with PetFusion’s cat furniture as one line among many.

For a design guide, PetFusion shows how a brand that began online, with cat furniture as its core, could keep its own name through two changes of ownership inside larger pet groups. Compare Hepper, the modern cat furniture brand that began in Vermont, and Tuft + Paw, another brand that treats cat furniture as interior design. For this guide we use walnut brown, slate grey and kraft with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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