Unlike in western countries, pet-friendly employers are not common in China. The culture of pets in the workplace is forming, and the related management system is not ready yet. Because of this, when pets are with humans in one place, the relationships among accompanying, management, and work create a series of new stories.

Why Do Employees Bring Pets to Office?

The phenomenon is mainly seen in some Chinese Internet companies, such as Bilibiil and Little Red Book. It’s a great honor to be hired by those companies, but the downside is that employees often have to work extra hours. It has become common for them to leave the office after 8 pm.

Because of the long working hours, many people can only watch their pets through CCTV applications on phones. Some rent houses near their offices so that they can go back home to feed pets during the lunch break.

The Pros and Cons

A tip for brands: being a pet-friendly employer has become a competitive factor in attracting talents in China! But it’s not always brownie points.

Pros

Compared with worrying about pets being alone at home, having them around and seeing are easier for pet parents at work. In some way, it helps to improve work efficiency.

Uban, “Chinese WeWork” exclusively for Internet companies, carries out research (办公室宠物报告) among 10 companies. It is found that 38% of employees feel that by bringing pets to offices, their working pressure can be eased, while 36% think it is good to keep their pets accompanied. The research also shows that pets at the office increase chances for colleagues to communicate with each other, which accounts for 15% of respondents.

Cons

Since taking pets to workday is just at its kickstart stage in China, there are issues to be addressed.

For example, what pets are allowed for employees to bring to offices? Dogs and cats are accepted. But what if your colleague brings a spider with dark furry tentacles to their seat? A user on “Chinese LinkedIn” Maimai(脉脉), complained that after his colleague brought a spider to the office, he would rather message him than go to his seat to discuss work.

Another issue is transportation. Since public transport doesn’t allow pets, options left for people are limited. If they live close to offices, they can walk. But if they need to hail a taxi, that’s big trouble. Many drivers don’t want to have pets in car, and as a result, it might take them half to an hour to get a car. And don’t forget that some people are allergic to pets’ hair.

International Pet-friendly Employers

More companies are open to pets in offices in western countries compared to China.

Amazon, the best dog-friendly US company of 2021, supports 7,000 registered dogs with an on-campus dog park and plenty of free poop bags and treats. Discounted pet insurance is also available to pet parents.

The leading tech company Salesforce allows employees to book designated areas for dogs in advance, namely puppy force. It has beds, water bowls, cages, and noise barriers to avoid disturbing employees.

Google, VMWare, and WeWork are also famous pup-friendly companies.

While the discussion of bringing pets to offices happened a couple of years ago, it is just brought to the table in China. What pets can employees bring and how to take care of pets at offices are yet to be clarified. 

Read more: 大厂员工带宠物上班之后

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According to Tmall, the majority of pet owners are young millennials and Gen Z females. Based on a report published by CBNData (2020中国互联网消费生态大数据报告), people’s pet-related consumption in 2020 was 1.5 times the scale of 2019.

Many domestic pet care brands are benefiting from people’s growing enthusiasm for raising pets such as Pidan (彼诞) which, founded in 2015, has already become a leader in the pet industry.

Hero Product

The product that brought it success was its Igloo cat litter box which won the RedDot Design Award in 2016, only a year after the company was founded. But the prize wasn’t the only thing that made it successful, it was also the product’s price. 

The average price of a cat litter box in China ranges from 30-200 RMB. At that time, the founder of Pidan, Ma Wenfei (马文飞), decided to sell the Igloo cat litter box at 365 RMB, which is way higher than the industry price.

It turned out that Ma made a smart decision. The high price earned the brand lots of attention and combined with the fact that the product had won a well-known international award, consumers believed that the product deserved the price.

Headstrong CEO Willing to Take Risks

There are only 55 people in the team, and as the CEO Ma has a one-vote veto. He often gets into debates with his sales department when it comes to pricing. For example, the cat litter box, which proved to be a correct decision. 

In terms of cat litter, Ma also applied the premium price strategy. He set the cat litter at 8 RMB per kilogram (the average price is 1-2 RMB per kilogram) and at the beginning, his colleagues thought he was putting the company at risk.

And it turned out that Ma made the right decision again. The high price and the high quality quickly earned the product lots of attention as well. By focusing on providing pets with the best product, Pidan achieved 220 million RMB in annual sales 5 years after it was founded.

Marketing Tactics

Pidan caters different marketing strategies based on different social media platforms.

Xiaohongshu

From Xiaohongshu, you can see Pidan’s consumers are loyal to the brand. There are a few negative posts saying Pidan’s products are not convenient to use, and in the comment area, its consumers are saying “the situation doesn’t happen to me” and they are suggesting the right way to use its products.

On its Xiaohongshu account, Pidan doesn’t sell any product. The majority of the posts are images of cute pets and there is a post inviting XHS users to create stickers based on its cozy duck Igloo box.

Weibo

Similar to its XHS content, Pidan posts images of cute pets, most of them are kittens.

On its Weibo account, Pidan also holds lucky draw activities to create more connections with its followers.

Douyin

The majority of Pidan’s content on Douyin is about users’ trying its products, which shows features of its products and its comparison with other similar brands.

Pet Brands Should Focus on Gen Z Consumers

According to the pet report (2019中国宠物行业白皮书), in 2019 23% of households in China have a pet. Compared with Japan, which reached 38% in 2018, China still has room to grow in the industry. 

What makes China’s pet industry different from either Japan or America is that the majority of pet owners in China are post-90s, among which, post-95s take up 35.6%. For pet brands, the most effective way to reach target consumers is social media promotion on channels where Gen Z are most active such as Douyin, Bilibili, Tmall and Xiaohongshu. 

Read more: “它经济”这一年太火！有商家营收两亿，有品牌融资两亿

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With 2020 being such a turbulent year, it is interesting to see what items made the list and how they are reflective of both major events, new regulations, and even some fun consumer trends. 

Below is the list of the top 10 items, in no particular order.

Face mask

The most significant change brought by COVID-19 is that wearing face masks when going out has become a must-do instead of a nice to do. 

In 2020, people searched for face mask or “口罩” on Taobao 7.5 billion times. 

Eggbeater

This may seem random, but this is another byproduct of COVID-19. When many people were confined at home, they started to learn baking and make cakes, therefore they needed an eggbeater. There were almost 100 million searches for eggbeater. 

Helmets

The product started to be searched a lot in May 2020 when China’s traffic administration published new regulations requiring people to wear helmets when riding an electric bike or a motorcycle. In May it was the product with the most growth year over year on the entire Taobao platform. 

Number 24 Jersey

On January 26, basketball star Kobe Bryant left the world. In remembrance, many Chinese fans searched for his jersey on Taobao. Many fans remarked, “I got his Jersey, but I will never have the chance to get it signed.” The sales volume of Number 24 jerseys was 6.8 times the sales in 2019.

JK Uniforms

There is a slang Chinese term called “three broken sisters” (破产三姐妹), a play on “two broke girls” which refers to girls who love dressing up in JK uniforms (Japanese school uniforms), Hanfu (traditional Chinese dress) and Lolita outfits. This is a very popular trend among Chinese post-00s consumers. They are referred to as broke girls because they spend a lot on these costumes.

Just how popular are they? A Taobao JK uniform store called Tufengfeng (兔缝缝) once launched a JK dress and the store sold more than 300k dresses just within 20 minutes after it was launched. Customers’ enthusiasm surprised the owner of the store and she had to stop the pre sell.

In Q2 2020, year-over-year sales of JK uniforms increased 255%. 

Pet Feeding Services

The past few years the pet economy has been booming in China, particularly among young people. When people are working away from home, they are lonely, so they raise pets as companions. When couples living together and they don’t want a child or they are not married yet, they raise a pet.

While they are raising pets, they may not always have time to take care of it or they go out for a journey and can’t be at home. Because of this, many businesses have launched on Taobao offering pet feeding services. 

In a Taobao store’s comment area, a user said: “It’s (the service) is way more professional than me. I went for a trip and when I got back home, the cat was bigger.”

Orders for pet feeding services increased 220% year over year. 

Re Gan Mian (a traditional Wuhan noodle)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we know the city of Wuhan was the one that suffered the first and the most in China. At that time, people outside Wuhan were praying for the city and giving their support. 

Wuhan is well-known for a type of noodle dish called Re Gan Mian. Because of this, an illustrator drew an image with a Re Gan Mian patient in the hospital. Outside of the glass window, there were many other local foods encouraging the patient to be strong. 

To help Wuhan’s economy recover from the effects of the virus, many ecommerce platforms, including Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao, started working with local Wuhan merchants to help promote their products online. Many of the top live streamers such as Viya and Austin Li also promoted Wuhan specialties. Re Ga Mian was one of the popular products that they promoted, with some netizens commenting, “I will gain several pounds to help Wuhan!”

5G Mobile Phones

Chinese people were very excited about the rollout of 5G which was searched 290M times on Taobao.

Ultraman

Ultraman is a character from the Japanese cartoon The Science Patrol. He is a hero in many people’s eyes. People who searched for this were mostly males. There were over 200 million searches for this term in 2020. 

One of the key reasons that Ultraman was searched a lot in 2020 was that, there was a new series of Ultraman released in the past year: Ultraman Z. It has a very high score (9.0) on Douban (豆瓣), a platform where users create content related to film, books, music and events.

Blind Box

From POPMART’s recent IPO in Hong Kong, you may already know the popularity of blind boxes in China. While other brands have started using the bllind box or mystery box concept, in China it is often synonymous with POPMART, the Chinese top toy maker. 

POPMART creates limited edition series of toys. Consumers purchase a toy from the series but they don’t know which one they got until they open the box. Some of the toys are very rare, which makes it even more exciting. 

With their relatively low price point and high resale value, buying POPMART blind boxes can be addicting and many Chinese consumers have grown massive POPMART collections. 

Read more: 刚刚，淘宝评出年度最“火”的十大商品

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