Americans are serious about pets!
According to a recent survey by the American Pet Products Association, approximately 67% of U.S. households own at least one pet—that’s 84.9 million homes!
The number of pet-owning Americans has been steadily increasing over the years. In 1988, the first year the same survey was conducted, 56% of U.S. households owned a pet. Of course, the more pet owners there are, the more demand there is for pet supplies and style. According to a new data analysis from Pattern.
- Consumer demand for pet food on Amazon skyrocketed 128% during the onset of the pandemic, compared to the average the rest of the year. It’s unlikely a spike like this will occur again, unless the nation experiences another widespread pandemic shut down.
- Demand for pet clothes/costumes spiked 340% ahead of Halloween. We expect to see a similar spike in demand this year ahead of Halloween.
- Demand for pet toys was up 40% overall during the holiday season and up 96% two weeks before Christmas. We expect to see a similar spike in demand this year during the holiday season.
Pattern also did a deep dive into the online sales of pet clothing (rejoice PupStylers!) for dogs, cats and yes, birds! Bird clothing is quickly catching on in market places like Etsy. You can find a community of bird fashion designers selling everything from hats and hoodies for your “Swat Team” attack bird to prosthetic little human arms so your Parrot can duke it out with the cat. Wanna place bets on the winner?
Oddly enough the study didn’t show any data on rodent fashion for Guinea Pigs or rats which Petsmart caters to during Halloween season but this study only focused on shopping with Amazon.
When is market demand highest for pet clothes?
To find out the answers to these questions, their data science team analyzed market demand for pet supplies on Amazon for 2019 and 2020. Amazon is a pretty good way to gauge over all market demand.
The clear winner here is Halloween, where demand surges by 200% to over 370% between the weeks of September 27th through October 25th. That’s a lot of pet Halloween costumes! Christmas appears to drive a slight increase in demand, and there’s a slight uptick in late February (before a steep pandemic-driven decline), but everything pales in comparison to Halloween.
When it comes to demand for pet Halloween costumes, dogs once again completely outrank the other pets they examined. Things are a lot closer during the rest of the year, though, with cat clothing actually outranking dog clothing during the week of February 23rd. Watch out doggies, Ninja cats are coming to get ya!
Here’s how demand changed throughout the year:
Demand for dog clothing spikes at +472% vs average during the week of October 18th, outpacing cat and bird clothing’s still-impressive increases of 380% and 377%, respectively. Start shopping early this year!
