Zooplus Brand Guidelines: Munich’s Online Pet Shop, Its Eyes Logo and the 2021 Takeover

Five founders and a publisher’s money.

Zooplus was a child of the first internet boom. English Wikipedia says Zooplus AG was founded on 28 June 1999 by Roland Honekamp, Cornelius Patt, Sven Rittau, Florian Seubert and Philipp Freiherr von Wilmowsky, to sell pet supplies in the young online market of the late 1990s. The publisher Hubert Burda Media helped finance the start and, English Wikipedia says, was for many years its largest shareholder, holding a majority from 2011 before it began selling down its shares from 2015. Several funding rounds followed the start, English Wikipedia says, although the end of the dot-com boom in 2000 made new investors harder to find; by 2007 the company still had only about 40 employees. Cornelius Patt ran the company as chief executive from 2006 to 2022.

The business began in Unterföhring, just outside Munich, and moved its registered office into Munich in 2008, the same year it went public. Its shares were listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in May 2008; the e-commerce blog Exciting Commerce wrote in January 2022 that, apart from Delticom, no German online retailer had stayed on the exchange longer. English Wikipedia says the shares moved to the Prime Standard segment in 2009, sat for many years in the SDAX index and joined the MDAX in September 2021.

English Wikipedia describes Zooplus as a pure online retailer of pet food and accessories, and Design Tagebuch wrote in September 2024 that it runs local online shops in 30 European countries. The company also changed its legal form: since February 2022 it has been a European company, Zooplus SE.

A bidding contest and a private future.

The listing ended in a contest between investors. English Wikipedia says that on 13 August 2021 Zooplus signed an investment agreement with Zorro Bidco, a company controlled by funds advised by Hellman & Friedman, which made a voluntary takeover offer. In early October 2021 a vehicle held by EQT bid higher; Hellman & Friedman raised its own bid, and in the end the two firms joined forces in a joint offer, and more than half of the shares were tendered. Exciting Commerce reported on 17 January 2022 that by the close of the acceptance period on 12 January the bidder had secured about 97 percent of the share capital, that the delisting had taken effect, and that trading on Xetra and the regional exchanges had stopped. Zooplus had spent about thirteen and a half years on the stock market.

As of January 2025, the trade magazine pet named Hellman & Friedman and EQT as the owners. The same report said Zooplus had launched its own marketplace, open to other sellers, in France at the end of October 2024.

An online-only retailer depends on warehouses, and the logistics map has grown across Europe. In July 2022 pet reported that a new 41,000-square-metre logistics centre near Budapest had gone into operation after thirteen months of building, run for Zooplus by the logistics group Fiege, which also operates a centre for it in Italy. English Wikipedia adds a warehouse opened in 2023 at Bor, in the Czech Republic, and offices in Madrid, Kraków, Vienna and London alongside Munich.

The range mixes outside brands with the company’s own. English Wikipedia, citing the Lebensmittel Zeitung, names private labels including Briantos, Cosma, Purizon and Smilla, and says, citing Die Welt, that the range is tailored by country, with smaller dog-food packs sold in Spain.

Shops, clubs and own labels.

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 logo changed once in 25 years.

The Zooplus logo has a small trick: two of its letters look back at you. Design Tagebuch, the German corporate-design blog, reported on 13 September 2024 that the company had begun a rebrand and that the logo was being changed for the first time since the company was founded. The idea behind it stayed. The company’s motto, the blog wrote, is that Zooplus sees the world through the eyes of pets, and the new mark still embeds a pair of eyes in the “zooplus” wordmark.

What changed was the drawing. According to Design Tagebuch, the wordmark is still set entirely in lowercase, but in a different typeface whose letters are now rounded, while the shape and the colouring of the eyes were simplified. Green was kept as the primary colour and the main thing people recognise. On Facebook and Instagram, the blog noted, a single “o” eye now serves as the profile mark. The company described the change as part of a new brand design for its websites, social media and marketing campaigns; the redesign had by then already gone live on its German site.

The blog’s author, Achim Schaffrinna, found it remarkable that a young company had waited 25 years before redrawing its logo, and wrote that the rounded letters read as youthful and playful, though in his view the old mark had been more distinctive. He also pointed to a convergence in the category: Fressnapf had rebranded in May 2024, and the two retailers’ websites, once very different, had become similar in layout and design, even sharing the same warm yellow accent.

For a design guide, Zooplus shows how a one-idea logo, a pair of eyes set into a lowercase name, can be softened and simplified without losing the idea. Compare Fressnapf, the Krefeld store chain, and Chewy, the American online pet retailer. For this guide we use leaf green, pine ink and honey yellow with mint mist and chalk, set in a soft geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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