Why DTC wants a shelf

Only 3.3% of US pet dollars come from people who shop exclusively online, per the latest pet shopper analysis from NielsenIQ. So almost nobody has their wallet exclusively connected to a Wi-Fi router, and online is mostly where they reorder the bag they already know.

Nearly 70% of pet shoppers buy both ways, and that group drives 87% of the money.

Wuffes started in 2020 with a single hip and joint chew born from the loins of Meta ads. It sold on its own site first and added Amazon and Chewy later, and for about five years that was the whole map. Co-founder Sam Venning told the Social Paradigm Group podcast in August that the brand ran on Meta and Instagram alone, stayed put when everyone else diversified after iOS 14 and "just cleaned up" in a cheaper auction.

Early on, Venning said, a new customer cost about $35 and 52% of buyers on its landing page opted into a subscription.

This year the bootstrapped brand, which Venning says does about $100M a year, walked into more than 3,000 stores, starting with PetSmart and Petco and adding Tractor Supply in September.

Zesty Paws ran a version of this play years earlier, however it started on Amazon in 2015, got onto Target shelves in 2020 and sold for $610M a year later.

PetLab Co built its subscription business out of London, selling strictly direct and buying its customers on Meta. Its landing page sells the subscription first, at 40% off with free treats, and stacks five add-ons into the cart before checkout. Email does the retaining, and PetLab leaned on it hard enough that an agency once shut down and rebooted 90% of its automated flows in a single week to fix a Gmail spam problem.

PetLab grew big enough to draw a majority investment from BC Partners and now sells its chews through PetSmart.

Wuffes sells a subscription almost everywhere it sells a tub, through wuffes.com, Chewy Autoship, Amazon Subscribe & Save, PetSmart Autoship and Tractor Supply’s Smart Supply.

“Now we get to meet that customer where they already shop,” CEO Jonny Purcell said when the brand entered Tractor Supply. The store meets the customer, and whoever runs the subscription gets to keep them.

What a shelf can do for a brand depends on what it sells, and our count of top sellers found three very different aisles, with dry food still owned by the old names, supplements wide open to brands born online and toys up for grabs to whoever sells cheapest.

US pet sales hit $95.1B in the 52 weeks to June 27th, 2026, per NIQ's August pet retail report. Online grew 14.1%, in-store fell 1.4% and physical stores of every kind now hold 52% of pet sales, down 3.6 points in a year.

Amazon cashed most of that check. It held 21.4% of US pet sales in the 52 weeks to June 13th, up 1.9 points, while the online pet channel, where Chewy is the biggest name, slipped 0.6 points to 12.8%, according to NielsenIQ data reported by GlobalPETS.

Chewy grew, with its second quarter coming in at $3.33B, up 7.3%, or 5.7% without its recent deals. The periods don't line up exactly, but the pet specialist is growing at about half the speed of its own channel.

Chewy buys about 35% of paid search clicks in pet retail, per Adthena, roughly 10x Amazon's 3.4% and about double Petco's 16%.

Plenty of shoppers start their product search on Amazon itself, so Chewy ends up paying Google for a bigger share of its new customers (a toll road Amazon doesn't have to drive down). Chewy spent $824.9M on advertising and marketing last fiscal year, and search is only one line of that bill.

Also Chewy built vet clinics, and buying Modern Animal took it from 18 to 47, with plans to end the fiscal year near 60.

"4 out of 10 customers that are walking into CVC (Chewy Vet Care) are net new to Chewy," CEO Sumit Singh said on the June 10th earnings call. He credited the Chewy brand halo, with "very little local activation."

Chewy hasn't said where those people shopped before. So who are they?

They knew the Chewy name well enough to book a vet visit and had still never bought a bag of food from it, so the brand did the advertising and the building closed the deal. Chewy says each clinic sends about $800K in sales back to Chewy.com.

NIQ counted 1.7% more in-store pet shoppers last year, and each made 3.5% fewer trips, per its April Pet Summit deck. The shoppers still walk in, and the refill runs happen online.

Chewy's Autoship hit $2.8B in the quarter and now makes up 84.6% of sales.

During Amazon's Pet Days sale in May, the best sellers were bulk bags and multipacks from Purina Pro Plan, IAMS, Fancy Feast and Friskies, according to a YipitData breakdown. People buy 35lbs of something they already trust, at a discount, on a schedule (nobody discovers Fancy Feast during a Prime event).

Amazon's everyday best-seller lists look the same. In our pull earlier this month, national brands held 43 of the top 50 dog treats, led by Milk-Bone and Greenies, and Amazon's own labels made none of the three lists we pulled.

Staying in that refill line gets pricier every quarter. Brands' pet ad spend on Amazon rose 22% in the first quarter while their revenue grew 13%, according to a pet category report from CommerceIQ, so brands are renting their own customers back from Amazon at a price that grows almost 2x the sales.

Chewy sells the same ads to the same brands. It credited sponsored ads for most of its gross margin gain in the first quarter, and Singh told investors on the June call that he underwrites the ads business at about 3% of sales.

If the refill is locked up and the rent on it keeps rising, the expensive part for a growing brand is the first bag.

Jinx decided the store is where that first bag gets sold. The brand launched in 2020 as a DTC-first dog food, and when it moved into PetSmart last year, CEO Kyle Banahan put the store first and the website second.

"Our strategy is to be physically omnipresent, followed by our DTC and Amazon channels supporting that." Jinx now says it's in more than 10,000 doors.

Wuffes found its reason in its own customer file, where about 20% of its subscribers were already Petco shoppers before a single tub hit a Petco shelf, which means those customers were already walking past the spot and Wuffes just had to show up in it.

Venning gave two more reasons. Wuffes has hit the ceiling on Meta ("we can't spend any more on hip and joint"). And when the founders explored selling the company about 18 months earlier, buyers marked it down for selling almost entirely online, or as Venning put it, "a heavy discount for being just a DTC brand."

"Retail is a must," he said, and "you will be rewarded with that on a turn of multiple" at exit.

He also described the shelf working as an ad. A shopper sees the tub in a store, thinks "I saw that brand online," trusts Petco or PetSmart and decides to try it.

DTC sales took "a haircut" when Wuffes went into retail, the same as when it launched on Amazon, but Venning said "you can't judge it in silos" because the customers come back through the channel they prefer.

The retailers want this as much as the brands do, because a brand that built a following online shows up with proof of demand, a loyal customer base and shoppers who might not have walked in otherwise.

Petco's merchandising team said it wanted Wuffes' "cult following" in its stores. In March, Petco CEO Joel Anderson told investors it has about 25 new brands or flavors coming this year. He added that "34% of Gen Z customers shop exclusively in stores," per the fourth-quarter call.

If I had to guess, a big-box buyer sees an online-born brand as a much cheaper way to reach a younger customer who already knows the name than building that audience from scratch.

On October 10th, 2026, we pulled the top 50 listings in four dog categories at Chewy, Target and Walmart, plus TikTok Shop and Amazon. Then we sorted every brand into one of four types.

Not one of the 151 dry food listings at Chewy, Target and Walmart belongs to a DTC-born or marketplace brand, and the lists read Purina, Pedigree, Blue Buffalo, Hill's and the store brands.

Part of that is supply, since few DTC brands make kibble and the famous ones sell fresh food out of a freezer. Jinx does make kibble, sits in more than 10,000 doors and sells at all three of those chains, and it missed every one of their top 50s.

Amazon was the exception. Newer food brands took 4 of its 50 spots, and Jinx held two of them with 4-lb bags at $7.62, a trial size, which is usually the shelf's job.

BARK is exiting kibble and toppers altogether, "a category where scale economics favor players far larger than us," its CEO said in June.

Big box still makes room for newer food brands. Open Farm, which started in independent pet stores in Toronto in 2014, put up full-blown displays in PetSmart this summer across nearly 1,700 stores.

Getting the display is the easy-ish part, but getting the bag into the cart over Purina is the hard one.

DTC-born brands hold 38% to 84% of the supplement top 50 at the three store chains, and at Target, Zesty Paws alone holds 23 of 50 spots, which makes the aisle a Zesty Paws store with a few guests.

Only Zesty Paws and Pet Honesty made the supplement top 50 at all three retailers. Wuffes showed up only on Chewy, at No. 18, and its new shelves are at PetSmart, Petco and Tractor Supply, which our count didn’t cover.

Marketplace brands hold 28% of the toy top 50 at Chewy, Walmart and Amazon alike, while at Target, a curated shelf, it's 0% and the space goes to Target's own label and BARK.

Amazon's toy list still leans on the old guard, with KONG, Chuckit!, Benebone and Nylabone in 22 of the 50 spots.

There's a newer shelf, and it's a lot less friendly to DTC supplements.

On October 6th we asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude which supplement to buy for six common problems, like stiff joints, itchy skin and anxiety. We asked once as a vet wanting evidence and once as an owner wanting a product, and collected 216 answers.

A DTC brand was the top pick in 0 of 216 answers, which was shocking.

Nutramax, the company behind Dasuquin and Cosequin, owned the owner answers, named in 87 of 90 and the top pick in 49%. Owners got a caveat about the evidence in 11% of those mentions, while vets asking the same tools got one 87% of the time.

Asked as a vet about joint supplements for arthritis, ChatGPT said it "would not rank these highly based on current evidence" about Cosequin and Dasuquin, and said it would be "most comfortable recommending Antinol Rapid or a high-quality EPA/DHA product" instead. Asked as an owner whose 11-year-old Lab has arthritis, it ranked Dasuquin first and signed off with, “Simple answer: Buy Nutramax Dasuquin with MSM for Large Dogs first.”

So does the winner have the strongest science?

Nutramax was founded in 1992, against 2015 for Zesty Paws and 2020 for Wuffes, a 23-year head start in vet offices. Its own 59-cat trial of Dasuquin for Cats, which the company funded, found it "did not show pain-relieving effects" compared with a placebo.

We couldn't find a published trial for Zesty Paws, Pet Honesty or Native Pet either. Venning called most canine clinical studies rubbish for their tiny samples and said Wuffes borrowed from horse and cattle research. He said it now runs its own "really large clinical studies," and we couldn't find any of them published.

The AI tools are picking the oldest name in the vet's office, and nobody in the category has much published proof to argue with.

Meanwhile, Nutramax and Zesty Paws have fought in court since 2023 over Zesty's "#1 brand" claims, and the case is back in district court.

For a DTC supplement brand, the physical shelf is the easier one to win right now, because the AI shelf rewards tenure.

Only 5% of pet owners say they're very loyal to a toy brand, and 34% aren't loyal at all and buy on price and availability, per a survey by PETS International and Loop of almost 2,000 owners in six countries.

I bought the premium power chewer toys for years because my dogs obliterated everything else. They gave each one a quick sniff and a test bite and never played with it again, so I quit buying them. These days I buy slightly better soft toys, knowing they'll end up in pieces, because my dogs actually get some pleasure out of them.

Across three dog toy searches on TikTok Shop, established national brands took under 1% of the units we could count. KONG held the top search slots but showed a sold count on only two listings.

The volume went to names built online. Freezbone, which sells through its own site, TikTok Shop and a handful of boutique pet shops, shows 196K sold on its Freezball. And you won't find it in PetSmart stores.

Marketplace sellers took about 60% of units, led by Spoven's motion-activated ball at 101K and Mizusu's teaser toy at 73K, both pitched at cats as much as dogs.

Our patent dive found that 53% of pet toy patent filings from 2022 to 2024 named a China-based inventor, and the people designing the toys now sell them direct.

BARK learned this the expensive way, as its direct toy and accessory sales fell to $189.4M from $262.3M, as we covered in June.

Electronic pet toys grew 27% and treat-dispensing toys 15% in the year to June 27th, per the same NIQ report. Toys with a feature still grow, Spoven's rechargeable ball among them, while plush and rubber get hammered.

King Lou is a small treat company in Zionsville, Indiana, that sells a long list of single-ingredient treats, from duck feet and chicken feet to minnows. Its TikTok Shop page shows 357.5K units sold and 113K followers. Its duck feet ($25 for a 10-count pouch) show 42.2K sold across pack sizes.

King Lou's founder posted on LinkedIn in June that TikTok named it a Top Selling Brand. It runs TikTok LIVE shows that buyers pre-register for, and reorders go to its own site, where subscribers get 15% off.

Dewar Gaines of Gaines Family Farmstead, who we profiled in March, cut Meta and Google ads in May 2025 and moved his marketing to live selling on Whatnot, TikTok Live and Talk Shop Live.

On a good show he does $3,000 to $4,000 an hour and picks up about 20 new customers without spending a dollar on ads. Back when he ran ads, his cheapest new customer from paid social cost about $30. His Whatnot shop alone shows 68.4K items sold.

This isn't his first run with social video. A 2022 TikTok and Instagram video sent sales up "more than 6,000% almost overnight," per Amazon's own case study, which says Amazon remains the brand's largest source of income.

Remy Beaumont, who runs the TikTok Shop agency Z Media Group, says the halo reaches Amazon too. Speaking about the brands his agency runs, he said, "For every two orders we make on TikTok Shop, we can track at least one additional order on Amazon."

Momentum Works puts LIVE at about 8.2% of US TikTok Shop sales in the first half of 2026. Pet has barely touched LIVE so far, and most pet brands that scale there still do it with creator videos. Nobody needs a ring light yet, but the first brands with one will have the room mostly to themselves.

The shelf-as-billboard idea has real holes.

BARK is in more than 50,000 retail doors, per its annual filing, and its retail segment grew 2.3% last year. Some of the rush into retail is strategy, and some of it is a shrinking DTC business looking for anywhere else to go.

The shelf is also getting harder to sell from. Petco's second quarter shows services up 3.6% while merchandise slipped about 0.7%, by our math from its earnings release. Petco plans 15 to 20 net store closures this year and is pushing its own brands.

Tractor Supply is closing about 75 of its 209 Petsense stores. Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming grew system sales 25% to $150M last year, largely by opening stores built around grooming, which nobody can ship. A brand paying for a spot in a store that sells less stuff every quarter needs the billboard to work fast.

Fresh food splits in two. Freshpet has its own fridges in about 30,000 stores, while Ollie, Nom Nom and JustFoodForDogs rent space in Petco or PetSmart freezers. JustFoodForDogs also runs about a dozen of its own kitchens, where shoppers watch the food get made and buy it on the spot.

The Farmer's Dog picked Walmart as its first retail partner but only on Walmart.com, and Spot & Tango sells only direct while putting millions into brand marketing.

For some products the store still closes the sale, since NIQ says fresh dog food and supplements are still growing in stores. When a product needs a freezer or a close look at the label, the store is the register too.

Put together, the shelf does a different job in every aisle.

In dry food, national brands defend a bag that refills online, and newer brands show up on Amazon in trial sizes. In supplements, the physical shelf lets online-born brands in while the chatbots still hand the sale to legacy brands like Nutramax. In toys, price and novelty do most of the work, and loyalty barely exists.

Every brand in this piece runs its own math on slotting fees, margins, ad costs and what a buyer will pay at exit, and a top 50 snapshot can't see most of it. What it can see is a customer who meets a brand in one place and reorders it in another, and Wuffes, Jinx and Zesty Paws all ended up paying for both.