Each weekend, clusters of stylish strollers appear throughout Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park as parkgoers and pram-pushers meet friends and take photos. Increasingly, peering out from the strollers are the furry faces of well-groomed dogs.
As birthrates decline across much of East Asia — in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China — baby goods firms in these markets are increasingly turning their attention to the pet business, harnessing existing expertise and in-house talent to develop products for animals.
While companies have branched out into pet clothes and car seats, the stroller is perhaps the most visible indicator of the pivot.
AirBuggy, a prominent stroller brand in Japan, is one of a number of companies that views the pet market as an important growth area, having launched its initial pet cart product in 2010. The Tokyo-headquartered brand, which has separate retail segments for pets and babies and exports products globally, was founded by Mieko Iida, who wanted to rethink the stroller in Japan.
Now, as the birthrate declines, the pet market is growing at a faster pace than the baby goods market, said Yoko Shimada, the public relations division manager at parent company GMP International.
Other brands have made a similar pivot. Japan-headquartered Eightex, which has developed and marketed baby products for over 40 years, has drawn on “sewing skills and experiences obtained from baby products and travel accessories” to produce pet products, according to the company website. “Pets are important family members. Therefore, we would like to produce the products for them with our knowledge and skills obtained from making baby products.”
Elsewhere in Asia, companies to have made similar moves include Taiwan’s New Century and Chun Chan Baby Products, as well as South Korea’s HarrysPet, which transitioned from baby stroller accessories to those for pet strollers.
AirBuggy, which has distributors in Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand and a corporate presence in the U.S., has witnessed the change in the pet stroller market.
President Keita Haraguchi said that when the company first began designing the pet stroller and showed the concepts to investors or clients from Europe or America, they laughed.
A common reaction in Europe, Shimada said, was “dogs have four legs.”
While the pet stroller has long fascinated foreign visitors to Asia — at times sparking gawking media coverage — the device, which is a fixture of high-density, concrete-heavy cities such as Hong Kong, Taipei and Seoul, is marketed as a way to ferry pets to green spaces, take elderly or injured pets outside, or contain them in crowded spaces.
Now, Haraguchi said, as pets become a more prominent feature of daily life and more pet-friendly cafes and spaces open up, people want to bring their furry friends with them everywhere they go.
And while the pet buggy remains niche outside Asia, brands have sprung up in recent years in the U.S. and Europe too.
Pet ownership and spending in Asia is trending upwards. In South Korea, it is forecast to continue to rise, with the academics Jeehyun Kim and Byung Chul Chun writing in a 2021 report that the shift toward pet-ownership and “pet-related consumerism” was the result of structural population and lifestyle changes.
South Korea’s pet food market is likely to reach $1.69 billion by 2028, according to Mordor Intelligence.
In March, Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture (COA) stated that the number of pets on the island is on track to overtake that of children before 2027.
Last year, COA established a pet management division to regulate the industry and focus on pet ownership and welfare. "At the current 10% annual growth rate, that means there could be 12 million pet dogs and cats in the country by 2040,” COA Minister Chen Chi-chung said.
In Japan, where pets also outnumber children, the Japan Pet Food Association found that while dog ownership numbers dipped slightly in 2022 — cat-ownership remained stable — pet owners were spending higher amounts on their canine friends. Indeed, Mordor Intelligence forecasts that the nation’s pet food market will grow from $504.88 million in 2023 to $675.64 million by 2028.
Meanwhile, the Interpets trade fair has seen an uptick in the number of stalls and those in attendance.
“More different industries have entered the market. For example, vacuum cleaner manufacturers developed products specifically for pet hair,” said Nanako Kaku, a public relations representative at organizer Messe Frankfurt. “Also, more IT-based products are being developed.”
Aside from pets, some companies operating in countries with aging populations are also considering how to pivot to elderly people as demographics continue to shift.
Despite taking a hit to its baby diaper sales, China’s Hengan International Group, a manufacturer of sanitary napkins and diapers, gained revenue in the adult diaper category last year.
AirBuggy is also considering senior citizen products as they diversify and evolve their product offerings, according to Haraguchi.
Indeed, PR manager Shimada said the brand’s philosophy — summed up by a Japanese slogan on the company’s website that translates as “so that you can walk and live life with the ones you love” — isn’t consigned to one product category, which gives the company freedom to go into new areas.
“At the moment, so many stroller companies think about the pet cart, but our concept is totally different. Walking is our philosophy ... creating a good, healthy life with a loved one, sometimes our pet, sometimes our baby, sometimes our parents,” Shimada said.
Staff writer Karin Kaneko contributed to this story.
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