Petlove Brand Guidelines: The 1999 PetSuperMarket Web Store That Grew Into Street Shops

A veterinary clinic goes online.

Petlove began as a veterinarian’s side project. Marcio Waldman opened a veterinary clinic with a pet-products shop in São Paulo in 1988, StartSe reported in 2021. He told InfoMoney in 2022 that the clinic was in the Bom Retiro district, and that clients complaining about traffic and the lack of parking set him thinking about how to serve them at a distance. In 1999 he launched an online store under the name PetSuperMarket, according to Consumidor Moderno and StartSe; Portuguese Wikipedia gives the same name and year.

The early years were slow. Waldman told InfoMoney that he had to persuade the Brazilian postal service, Correios, to carry sacks of pet food — the post office, he recalled, was then used to shipping CDs for large online retailers — at a time when paying by card online was unusual and bank payment slips took days to clear. He ran the clinic and the website side by side from 1999 to 2005, then closed the clinic once online sales had overtaken it, he said. The idea for the website, he told Consumidor Moderno in 2020, came at a congress in the United States, where he met an entrepreneur raising money for a distance-selling business.

Outside money arrived in 2011. Consumidor Moderno reported that the company raised funds that year from Tiger Global, Monashees and Kaszek, after Waldman began looking for investors in 2010, when the team numbered eight people. In 2012 PetSuperMarket was renamed Petlove, StartSe reported. The investment firm Tarpon followed in 2019, and SoftBank and L Catterton in 2020, according to Consumidor Moderno and Brazil Journal.

Subscriptions, services and new shareholders.

Subscriptions shaped the business. Brazil Journal reported in October 2020 that more than 65 percent of Petlove’s sales came from subscriptions, in which a customer sets up a basket of products delivered at regular intervals, and that it had 160,000 active subscribers. At that point, the paper said, a Tarpon-led investor group held about a third of the company, SoftBank another third, L Catterton and the founder with managers about 15 percent each, and Monashees the rest.

By early 2022 the name covered a group rather than a single shop. InfoMoney described Petlove in February 2022 as a business that brought together the online store, a subscription club and the DogHero walking and boarding app.

In October 2020 Petlove agreed to buy DogHero, a pet-services marketplace founded in 2014 for boarding, dog walking, day care and pet sitting, in a share swap that also bought out DogHero’s US investor Rover, Brazil Journal reported; DogHero’s owners were to hold 7 percent of the combined company, and its founders Fernando Gadotti and Eduardo Baer stayed on as executives, Gadotti running services and Baer subscriptions. The paper put DogHero’s customer base at 1.4 million and Petlove’s at 4.2 million, with an overlap of about 260,000. Consumidor Moderno wrote that the two companies had shared investors and had worked together under a commercial partnership since 2016.

New shareholders followed. In April 2021 the insurer Porto Seguro took a 13.5 percent stake and moved its pet-insurance operation into Petlove under a new name, Porto.Pet, StartSe reported. In 2022 Grupo Globo, the Rio de Janeiro media group, became a shareholder through its investment arm Globo Ventures, GlobalPETS reported in October that year, naming Talita Lacerda as chief executive; InfoMoney had described Waldman in February 2022 as founder and board member. In August 2025 NeoFeed listed Kamaroopin and Riverwood Capital among the company’s backers alongside SoftBank and L Catterton.

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.

From web store to street shops.

After more than two decades online, Petlove moved onto the street. Its first physical shop opened in the Moema district of São Paulo in 2022, and by March 2023 it had five units and two kiosks in the city, Mercado & Consumo reported from a retail forum where Waldman spoke. He described the shops as a mix of physical and digital, with click-and-collect lockers, an endless-aisle range ordered in store, parking and a play area for pets, and said the aim was to display products “as if we were a boutique,” with sacks of food kept in the stockroom rather than on the shop floor. As of June 2026, NeoFeed reported, Petlove had more than 20 physical stores and about 8,000 partner pet shops, while about 95 percent of its sales were still made online; the same report named Talita Lacerda as chief executive.

Petlove also took part in the competition review of the merger between Petz and Cobasi. NeoFeed reported in August 2025 that Petlove had joined the case as an interested third party and appealed after the general superintendency of CADE, Brazil’s competition authority, cleared the deal without conditions in June 2025. CADE’s tribunal approved the merger on 10 December 2025 on condition that 26 stores in São Paulo state be sold, according to CADE’s announcement, and the combined group began trading in January 2026.

For a design guide, Petlove shows how a web-store name adopted in 2012 has been stretched over subscriptions, services, insurance and, since 2022, street shops. Compare Cobasi, the São Paulo chain whose merger Petlove contested, and Pet Circle, an online pet retailer in Australia. For this guide we use a plum, a coral and a cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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