About the episode

Pet ownership is booming – and so is the business behind it. Worth an estimated $21.3 billion annually, the pet business is booming as nearly three-quarters of Australian homes now have a pet.

From birthday parties for pets to organic food and premium grooming, consumers are spending big to keep their animals healthy and happy. So why are people so invested in their pets?

AGSM @ UNSW Business School MBA alumna Anneke van den Broek is the CEO and founder of premium pet-care brand Rufus & Coco. She explains our changing relationship with our pets and how it’s reshaping the multi-billion-dollar industry.

This episode is hosted by Dr Juliet Bourke. 

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Transcript

Dr Juliet Bourke: Pet ownership is booming, and so is the business behind it. With more than three-quarters of households owning a pet or two fur babies, it isn't just a cute millennial term; it reflects a much bigger shift. We rely more on our pets for our mental wellbeing, and pets are taking centre stage in our photos, an annual calendar of birthdays, consumers are spending big to keep them happy, healthy and pampered, from organic food and premium grooming to doggy daycare. So what's driving this growing phenomenon? Annika van den Broek is leading this trend. She founded Rufus & Coco, an Australian-owned petcare brand. She scaled into a multi-faceted global business.

Anneke van den Broek: A lot of the products that you could buy, that you kind of wanted were well overpriced in veterinary clinics. And I thought it should be made accessible. And there'd be other people that would want to buy products that were more innovative, more on trend that were more sustainable, great value.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Pet care has quickly become one of the fastest-growing industries in the economy, but being a first mover only gets you so far. How do you hold on to that advantage as competitors crowd in, and how do you get the big players to play with you?

Dr Juliet Bourke: This is The Business Of a podcast from UNSW Business School. I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, an Adjunct Professor in the School of Management and Governance. Thanks Annika, for joining us. I'm curious to understand the pet industry in 2025 with Australians spending over 21 billion on pets annually, how has this boom shaped the business of pet care, and what opportunities does it present for entrepreneurs like you?

Anneke van den Broek: It is an enormous category. It's twice as big as poultry in this country. You know, I love it when people come up to me at dinner parties and things, and they say, What do you do? And I said, I work in pet care, and everyone's like, well, that's cute. And I think to myself, well, you know, it's a massive industry, and in the time that I've been in it, it's literally doubled. Pet ownership actually has soared from 50% to 73% of households in the last 10 years. And I think what's happening is people basically humanising their pets and therefore wanting products that were as good as what they bought from themselves for their pets. And certainly that was one of my missions. When I started the business, I really couldn't find anything that wasn't sort of like a daggy product on the shelf.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So just taking you back to that comment you just made about humanising, I keep hearing this term fur babies, and I wonder what it signals for us that we are humanising our pets. Now. What does it say about our relationship to pets? What does it say about mental health?

Anneke van den Broek: Wellbeing, gosh, it's such a big trend. And, you know, being in the centre of it all, we see people throwing their dogs dinner parties. You know, really, on everything that you would do with a child, they are applying the same love to a pet. Look, I think it's amazing, because the World Health Organisation says that one in six people are lonely, and I can't help but think that pets are the antidote, because they really teach us unconditional love, and they really do drive connection. They help our physical and our mental wellbeing, and birth rates are actually down at the same time that pets are up. So I think my personal mission now is finding a way to make pets more welcome in public spaces. Because if pets are such great companions, and it's proven, and you know, we have this epidemic of loneliness, I think pets could be the answer.

Dr Juliet Bourke: That is a really great point, and it has always struck me as a question. We go to Europe and we see dogs in cafes, and in Australia, they have to wait outside tethered to a tree. What is that about?

Anneke van den Broek: Well, it's ridiculous, and it's mindset, and I'm determined to change it, and not just for cafes, but probably more importantly, for where people live, because over 50% of Australians live in rented and tenanted accommodation. And you know, I've heard of some terrible stories of people choosing to live in their car because they're not allowed to live with their pet. You know, it's terrible.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So you've talked about increased ownership of pets, and you've also talked about wellbeing. Is there anything else in the ecosystem that's shaping the world of pets?

Anneke van den Broek: From a commercial perspective, covid had a massive impact. You know, people were in their homes, and they were all looking for a friend, and that friend often had. It's tail wagging. And basically there are a lot of players that entered the pet market because they saw the opportunity and they saw the growth in that market. And you have to remember, travel was down as a category, all these other retail categories were down. So the likes of Bunnings entered the market, and I feel that they really drove a lot of the value of the market down into a sort of cheaper product that was directly sourced out of China, and that forced a lot of the retailers to come to us for more margin, more promotions. You know, it's very hard to sustain your business that way at the same time as international freight going through the roof and all your people prices going up and commodity prices going up. It was really a sandwich at the time, and so for us, it drove enormous competition into the market, and that has actually created an opportunity to refocus as a business, because we actually used to have products that sat across all these different categories, and we now really narrow our focus more into pet personal care or well being for pets. And I think that's the challenge in business, isn't it? You know, it is the whole adapt or die. You need to not be the frog in the pot, you know that eventually just boils itself. You need to actually recognise when the water's getting warmer.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Oh, definitely some hard lessons there. But let's go back in time. How did you start this business? A bit more about Rufus and Coco. How did you build that business?

Anneke van den Broek: So Rufus and Coco is a business I started 18 years ago. We sell a whole suite of products that really cater for the personal care of pets, categories such as cat litter, litter accessories, grooming products, dental products. In addition to that, we have some other businesses that offer services for pets, such as grooming and non-sedated dental and so my career has been in corporate Australia. I was the director of marketing for Blackmores, the general manager of Sportscraft, divisional manager of Pacific brands. I had my time in fashion, and really I wanted to have a family, and I was working very long hours, and I'd always wanted to own my own business. In fact, my first foray into business was at the age of six, when I used to breed and sell mice to the local pet shop. I did read that I was always at the pet shop, you know, like a lot of kids staring through the window, and I remember going up to the man in the shop saying, Well, my mice are prettier than your mice. And he goes, Well, show me. And I remember taking my mice up, and he goes, Well, can you get me mice like yours. I was like, Okay, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was made redundant then for my last role in sports craft, and it was a fantastic opportunity to actually consider really what I wanted to do, and I did what every person needs to do when they're made redundant and have a well-earned break in Bali. And I remember sitting there with my girlfriend by the pool with a cocktail napkin, sort of scribbling on the cocktail napkin. She's like, Have you decided what you're going to do yet? And I said, Yeah, I'm going to create Australia's most trusted pet care brand, you know? And I went on, and she said, Why do you want to do that one? I said, Well, that's the one that I care about the most. You know, it was having grown up with more than 50 pets, I just felt like there really wasn't a brand that I could turn to for the types of products I wanted to buy that were more innovative, more on trend, that were more sustainable, were great value. You know, a lot of the products that you could buy, that you kind of wanted were well overpriced in veterinary clinics. And I thought it should be made accessible, and there'd be other people that would want to buy products like me, and having had the time in marketing and branding and products, I suppose I felt that was something I could really apply to the category to make a difference.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Was there anything else in the background that led you to, it's going to be a premium pet care range that you're going to be involved in? You could have done anything. You could have done fashion. You've had lots of experiences.

Anneke van den Broek: Not really. I just once I decided, that's what I decided. And I just started doing that. Of course, often when you come out of corporate, certainly, I had a degree of arrogance around what I was capable of doing. It's very different though, when you have teams helping you, when you have a structure, when there's an established brand, when you start it all yourself from day dot, and you have to actually sell the dream there that was extremely character-building. I remember walking with some of my products into the pet store. And, you know, like I used to be in these roles where people used to, I don't know, shout me tickets to things. And I remember standing behind the pet shop owner while he was serving people. Sometimes they'd make me stand there for like. Good half hour just to prove the point. And I was like, Really, mate. But you know, it was, it was good. It was a good lesson in humility, and it was certainly a good lesson in how to sell, because unless you can sell, and you know, my father used to say that he used to sell life insurance, and at the time, I fobbed him off, but he used to say, Anne, unless you can sell, you got nothing. And he goes, everybody's a salesperson and and I understand it now, because you have to be able to sell whether you're actually selling products, whether you're selling the business's idea, whether you're actually selling the opportunity to Chinese suppliers, so that they actually provide you with the product they've got. It's a really important skill.

Dr Juliet Bourke: And now you've made this leap from being a niche brand, and you're in supermarkets across Australia. How do you approach that large pitch, as opposed to standing in front of the guy who's selling product in the local pet food store.

Anneke van den Broek: That was actually easier, because that's what I'd done in my jobs before. Although when I say easy, it wasn't easy. It took me three or four presentations to actually get our products in, and remembering that the way supermarkets work is they have a range review, which is usually annual. So it took three years to get the products in. You know, it was very interesting in terms of pivoting the range and learning. And I think, you know, sometimes timing is everything, and the person you're presenting to. And the woman that actually did put us in set, her name was Jennifer Rogers, and she had a good mind for consumer and a good eye for brand. But I actually met her in Germany, of all places, when I was exhibiting my products over there, and she came up to the stand and started talking to me. I had no idea who she was, and I said, Well, isn't it funny that I can sell products in other countries around the world? I can't even sell it to my own supermarket. And she said, Oh, Annika, come and see me. And that was in April of 2010 and by October 2010 we had 23 products in 900 stores. And I remember waiting anxiously for the products to arrive on shelf and getting the kids out of the car and running into the supermarket, standing in front of the shelf, crying, and oh, makes me almost cry now she's she said to me, why are you crying? Just happy tears, happy tears, you know, like such a long time ago. But we're very thankful for that partnership, and we have changed our range, changed buyers so many times, but it's such an opportunity for your brand to be in one of the world's largest supermarkets. It's brilliant.

Dr Juliet Bourke: You make it sound like luck, but you were making your own luck as well. You were putting in the hard yards beforehand, and now putting in the hard yards. What does that look like? You said the market has really changed in the last few years. What do you see influencing the change in lifestyle? For example,

Anneke van den Broek: What we're finding is that the retailers are doing a lot of private label and a lot of categories, and we have retailers in there that are really driving the value down. So where we are now playing is in an area that has more innovation and more sustainable products and then more premium, and that way we can still provide value to our retail partners at the top end and high margins, and we can survive ourselves and thrive. And so now what we do is we work on a lot of products that are smart, things like pH health check litter that actually indicate the wellbeing of a cat through its pH and its urine. We have products that are more eco-friendly, such as poo bags. I mean, it's extraordinary to think that about 2 billion poo bags in Australia alone go into our waste system. So we make them out of cornstarch so that they actually degrade and break down. And you know, they're good looking poo bags, which I know sounds ridiculous, but even for me, like I just I want to be out with all the good looking products. I want products that are as good as what I'd buy for myself, even if I am picking up the poo, so we're very focused on that now. So basically, it's a personal care system for pets.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So those are some of your products. But can you tell me a bit more about the dental care you offer as well?

Anneke van den Broek: So when I talk system, I'm talking about combining service and combining dental so we offer high-end grooming. We have three locations at the moment in Sydney, and we just started a new business, which is called the fur Dental. It is non-sedated teeth cleaning for dogs and cats, and because so many of our pets are now sleeping on our bed and kissing us, and we're kissing them, and I love that. But. It's great to be able to get closer without the pungent smell of their bad mouth odour. So yeah, I'm looking forward to being able to really build that out and offer that in more areas.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So you know, businesses always have a choice. They can make money by being a volume player. They can make money by being a premium player. You've chosen premium, but premium seems to me to have a lot of risks associated with it, particularly in terms of the external economic market. You know, we've got tariffs happening in the US. We've got cost of living going on, and if your business is to some degree reliant upon a discretionary spend. How do you balance that? Do you do it through a diversified portfolio? I mean, how do you price in your risk or manage your risk?

Anneke van den Broek: The really cool thing about me and my team is that we are all animal mad, and, you know, we really think ahead. And so I think what it is is innovation. I think innovation is the answer, and you only get now a very short amount of time. And so it is a constant challenge, for sure. And I think in order to be able to stay in store that, gosh, risk, if I was to unpack it from my perspective, I'd sit and map out all my stakeholders, you know, like, is it a market? Is it a distributor? Is it a customer? Is it a retailer? Is it a finance risk, a supply chain risk, a person risk, a process risk, I'd sit and then I'd have a game plan for each of these things, and we do that as a business all the time, and being clear on your purpose, making sure it's differentiated, and ultimately giving the retailers what they want, because they're the ones that are ultimately then serving it to the customers. And, you know, being a bit like a meerkat in a hill, continuing to look for the next thing that's coming in.

Dr Juliet Bourke: I really like that analogy the meerkat on the hill, because when I hear your story of your business, I think you really had, in some ways in the Australian market, a first mover advantage. But what I also heard from you is that if you have that advantage, the time for that advantage is shrinking and you need to innovate to get to the next advantage. Is that how you think about yourself?

Anneke van den Broek: Absolutely, I see it with everything now and now, with the presence of AI, wow, that lead time just got shorter. Didn't it like your ability to answer and respond and no, it's even shorter now. And I think that's the opportunity then, in terms of execution internally, is being able to just maintain a pulse that keeps you on top of everything. You know, there's no sort of sitting around waiting to bank a cheque anymore.

Dr Juliet Bourke: But your pulse, the way you're keeping on your pulse, you said you're going and engaging with other people who are pet owners. Everyone in the business is pet mad. You can look at data, but there's something very human, isn't there about staying on top of trends. How else do you do it?

Anneke van den Broek: I think there's a lot that you can glean from other industries. Probably one of the best things I do is I belong to an entrepreneur organisation that has about 15,000 entrepreneurs around the world who have businesses that turn over more than US$5 million. And in my forum, I have people who are lawyers, that are running furniture businesses, kitchen businesses, AI businesses, and some of my best ideas come from them, or they make suggestions to me sometimes because they're coming at it from a completely different lens. I used to think my best ideas came when I was travelling, and often when I'm not working is actually totally when I get the insight, or if I'm meditating, or something like that, it's not often staring at the problem at all.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So what else does it take to stay competitive and adapt to changing markets? Here's Professor Barney Tan.

Professor Barney Tan: Anneke talks about how globalising an online pet supplies business is so much harder than just switching on international shipping at checkout. The first challenge, she says, is all about red tape and logistics. Pet Food and Health Products sit in this strange space between food, agriculture and pharmaceuticals. Markets like China are starting to open up for cross-border economists, but the labelling, ingredient and import rules change all the time, and expectations around delivery are huge. People want next-day shipping, cold chain transport for certain products and easy local returns. It's why so many brands expanding in places like the US or Europe end up teaming with specialist operators who are already handling warehousing compliance and retailer integration, rather than trying to do it all themselves. But the deeper challenge is cultural, especially if you want to tap into the emotional economy, take an Australian premium pet care brand trying to expand into China, or paper, it looks like a dream market. Pet ownership is booming, and there's strong demand for imported, safe, premium products. But it's not as simple as translating your website and shipping a few pallets. You have to show up where Chinese pet owners actually live emotionally, and that may mean doing your transactions on major e commerce platforms, but also telling your brand story on Chinese social and content channels, where the best brands can earn trust by educating consumers about ingredients, health and responsible ownership, your Australian clean and green story still matters, but it needs to connect with local ideas of status, aspiration and family, the dog and the shampoo bottle might be the same, but emotional script could be totally different. In one culture, you're the devoted fur baby parent. In another, you're a successful urban professional signalling taste and responsibility. In the end, globalising a pet business is about emotional translation. You're not just exporting a product, you're exporting a relationship between humans and animals, and that relationship is always shaped by culture.

Dr Juliet Bourke: So Annika Rufus & Coco has become a global business today. You started in Australia and have expanded overseas to America, Canada, China, Singapore, Thailand, just to name a few of the countries you're in. What was it about those countries that made you see a market?

Anneke van den Broek: I spent a lot of time travelling to the different trade shows, and so I would go in and look at what they actually had in store. I would watch the customers with their dog at the salons. I would talk to the people at the trade shows and understand what was trending, what was happening, that type of thing. And often I would get introduced to people, and that was the opportunity to sort of get going. And initially, to be honest, it was like emergent kind of strategy that was like, you want to buy it? Great. Let's buy it. Obviously, as time's gone on, it's much more sophisticated export strategy in that, you know, we've got great data. There's so much data that you can get out of Euro monitors. And we work on numbers first, which certainly wasn't the way that I started. I just saw it as a shiny Penny, really. But now we work on the numbers. We work on the attitudes, like we've got a distributor in Canada who does an amazing job. We do our packaging with French Canadian, obviously, on the packs. So we've had to really learn what works in the different markets as well. And hasn't always stuck. I think we've been in, in and out of China three times, and China has really changed, and they are so fast. And so it is certainly an opportunity for us in time, but right now, it's, yeah, certainly we're not there at the moment.

Dr Juliet Bourke: I'm surprised about some of the Asian countries to a degree. I mean, I know that there's a growing middle class, but I didn't think that there was a high rate of pet ownership there relative to mature markets, is that changing?

Anneke van den Broek: Yes is the answer. I mean, certainly in China, it's definitely got one of the fastest ownership growths in the world. I think the thing that in the Asian markets is they appreciate brand and they appreciate Australia, and that's where we win. So some of the products that we sell are grooming products that are Australian made, a range free from all the nasties, like sulphates and parabens and that type of thing. And they've all got Australian essences. We use a coconut surfactant. And so being an Australian brand and being a brand is what they appreciate.

Dr Juliet Bourke: And did you experience any challenges being an Australian brand breaking into those markets.

Anneke van den Broek: Oh so funny. Many, many. I remember when we got ranging into Petco, and Petco is one of the largest pet retailers in the world, based in America. When they found out we were in Australia, they were like, Oh God, you know Australia. And I'm like, do you buy products out of China now? And they're like, Yeah. And I'm like, we're just next door to China. That was like, how I just minimised the distance, the extra distance. I'm like, we're neighbours, so it'll be fine. And then they give you portals. You know, all these retailers have got portals. We have to enter all your data. And you know, it's quite onerous. And in the drop-down list of countries, Australia wasn't even a country, so they had to go back to their IT department to code in Australia, so we could actually get ranged. I've got a lot of stories like that.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Yeah, I get that you thought about franchising. You thought about partnerships. What's your advice to others thinking about how you can scale up?

Anneke van den Broek: It depends on the goal. And for me, personally, owning my business is important because it's what absolutely gets me out of bed. It allows me to create my own destiny every day with people that I choose to work with, and I love that I've worked in corporate. It's where, you know, you deal all day with politics, not outcomes, and it does my head in, you know, I don't want to be stuck with that. And if we had lots of different partners and things, I think I'd be spending a lot of time reporting, not creating great products. And, you know, people ask me now, well, what's your favourite part of what you do? And it's certainly in the creation piece, but probably some of my happiest moments are in the salons with the dogs. My groomer keeps telling me to stop patting their heads because I'm pushing down their coifs. But you know, that's what makes me happy. So I'm just I really focus on that now, because I have so many amazing team members that are probably far more competent in their actual areas than I am, so enabling them to do their jobs well, well, I can actually bring the broader vision to the business.

Dr Juliet Bourke: I really like the fact that you think about success as what success means to you, not a sort of cookie-cutter that the industry says. Where do you see the pet industry going in the next 10 years, and what part will Rufus & Coco have in that growth?

Anneke van den Broek: Oh, look, I can see continued growth, which is fantastic for the industry and ownership. I believe that we'll continue to do what we're doing now, really, and now that we've built this model where we combine product and service in the personal care space. I can see us expanding that across Australia and, in fact, across the world. The thing that I'm not clear on yet is what AI will do, and what does that mean in terms of how we can track our pets, health and wellbeing and basically provide all types of products and services for a pet. I'm not clear on that, and that's an obvious opportunity that needs some thinking from a personal perspective. I'd also love to see us changing some of the policies where pets are not allowed, and making public spaces more welcoming and really helping humanity one pet at a time.

Dr Juliet Bourke: Thanks to Anneke van den Broek for joining us on this episode. The Business Of is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset studios.

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