How a Chinese City Produced a Fortune From the World’s Lockdown Animals

ZHEJIANG, East China — On a cavernous factory flooring, workers dressed in blue overalls are sorting as a result of huge piles of canine chews molded into the condition of candy canes.

The personnel meticulously inspect and weigh each individual item, before bagging it all set for shipment. In a month or two, the festive pet treats will start out their very long journey to the West, where they’ll hit grocery store cabinets in time for the Xmas searching hurry.

The manufacturing facility is just one of dozens in Shuitou, a small Chinese town that has occur to dominate the world-wide industry for an strange item classification: novelty pet components.

Shuitou is a vintage case in point of a Chinese “specialty city”: a production hub that has concentrated all its electricity on a single highly distinct industry. Other parts of China’s industrialized shoreline are filled with corporations building socks, chandeliers, or bathrooms. In Shuitou, it’s canine leashes, cat carriers, and pet clothing.

The city in east China’s Zhejiang province pumps out a huge 4.5 billion yuan ($630 million) of pet products a year, which are exported to more than 60 international locations. In some regions, Shuitou is now completely dominant.

All over 60% of the world’s pet chews are produced here. Just one manufacturing facility alone produces 50 million leashes a calendar year. Additional than 4 in 5 American pet house owners use goods created in Shuitou, nearby corporations say.

And the sector is continue to developing quickly. In contrast to other elements of China’s economic climate, the pet marketplace thrived during the pandemic. Businesses in Shuitou reported double-digit income bumps, as men and women all over the planet adopted cats and pet dogs to continue to keep them organization all through lockdown.

Creating a ‘pet town’

Shuitou’s emergence as a pet sector juggernaut began a 10 years back, when the city was browsing for approaches to revive its flagging economic system.

For the duration of the 1980s and 1990s, the space experienced been popular for a fully various sector: rawhide leather-based. Identified as “China’s leather funds,” the town was stuffed with hundreds of tanneries that generated 4 billion yuan of leather a 12 months at their peak.

But the market also designed horrifying levels of air pollution. The leather-based-producing process works by using significant portions of industrial chemicals, and workshops generally discharged these chemical substances straight into neighborhood waterways.

By the 2000s, the town’s rivers were being running black and emitted a noxious odor. The pollution was so shocking that Chinese authorities named and shamed Shuitou in a checklist of 10 spots that had expert egregious amounts of environmental violations.

The regional federal government reacted by launching a large cleanup campaign. It banned the most polluting part of the market — chrome tanning — and launched rigid environmental criteria. In excess of the following years, the range of tanneries in Shuitou fell from over 1,000 to just 8.

The city urgently desired a new way to make progress devoid of the leather-based marketplace, and that was when local authorities established the objective of reworking Shuitou into a “pet city.” They developed a gleaming new visitor heart in the condition of a puppy bone, and available a vary of subsidies to providers preparing to commit in the pet market.

Chen Zhenbiao, founder of the local organization Petpal Pet Nutrition Technological know-how, was a vital determine at the rear of the alter. While the leather and pet industries appear worlds apart, the changeover happened really normally, he describes.

In 1992, Chen’s father was managing a business enterprise marketing chemical compounds to tanneries in Shuitou. Leather-operating provides a substantial amount of money of off-cuts, which community workshops would basically discard. But a person working day a customer from Taiwan stated in passing to Chen and his father that companies in the West applied people excessive products to make puppy chews.

“We did not know much about pet chews then, but just one of my classmates performing at a international trade firm requested me if I could clearly show him some samples,” Chen recollects.

Chen leaped at the opportunity. At the time, he was performing as a middle university teacher, earning just 100 yuan for every month. On one particular event, he was so short of income that he could not manage to just take his daughter to the medical center when she fell unwell with a fever.

“My coronary heart ached,” Chen states. “I asked myself, if I proceed to train, will I be equipped to supply my relatives with a far better life in a decade’s time? What is the way out?”

So, Chen left his college, borrowed some cash, bought some simple tools, and made up his 1st sample pet chews — washing the leather to get rid of the acid, then slicing and drying it. 

His spouse and father had been much from amazed. At the time, they considered Chen was creating a error by quitting his secure educating task. But it wasn’t lengthy in advance of Chen received his initial get: A company in Canada paid 300,000 yuan for a batch of chews.

“At the time it was genuinely a big volume of income — it was unpredicted and unbelievable,” Chen suggests with a smile. “They stated our products and solutions were being very good quality, but that we hadn’t dried them perfectly. We’ve stored improving them ever given that.”

The organization has by no means appeared back. Petpal Tech now exports above 200 million chewing sticks to the U.S. by yourself every 12 months, and its factory in Shuitou employs around 1,000 folks. It also operates services in Southeast Asia and New Zealand.

These days, Petpal Tech operates in a really competitive market, as dozens of providers are now primarily based in Shuitou. But world need for pet items has boomed the past several many years and displays small indicator of slowing down.

Yuanfei, a nearby company that manufactures dog chews, leashes, and pet toys, informed Sixth Tone that the pandemic was the quickest-developing interval in its record. Profits in 2021 arrived at 1 billion yuan, up from 378 million yuan in 2017. Petpal Tech, meanwhile, saw revenues soar over 36% past calendar year.

New tips

Area authorities and organizations, nevertheless, look keen to cut down their dependence on foreign pet homeowners.

Even though demand from pet house owners remained powerful, the pandemic however confirmed how fragile an export-led production method can be. Petpal Tech observed a number of of its overseas factories shut down quickly due to lockdowns, Chen suggests.

The corporation plans to carry on growing into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, but a big aim is now tapping China’s domestic sector. 

The Chinese pet market is expanding rapidly: buyers spent 270 billion yuan on their pets in 2021, up 8.7% 12 months-about-yr, and 40% of Chinese pet house owners say they now take into account their animals to be users of their family.

Petpal Tech has expanded its products variety to appeal to these domestic potential buyers. Fairly than obtaining their pet dogs chewing sticks, Chinese house owners usually favor to pay back superior rates for nutritious treats like sweet potatoes wrapped in duck meat, Chen states. 

“We goal people today who adore their animals and aren’t cost-sensitive,” suggests Chen. “As very long as we manufacture fantastic solutions, there will be a industry for us.”

Yuanfei, a person of Petpal Tech’s rivals, also has designs to increase its domestic income. It is currently having difficulties to influence Chinese people to purchase dog chews, but it is investing in e-commerce with the hope of attracting extra potential buyers, suggests Chen Qun, the company’s deputy standard manager, who isn’t associated to Chen Zhenbiao.

“Our behaviors and ideas of caring for animals even now differ from those people in Western countries,” he says. “We want providing dogs snacks, and the improve still wants a system.”

For the area govt, the hope is that Shuitou can sooner or later move beyond producing into other pet-linked industries. Officials say they want Shuitou to build into a true “pet town” — a location that center-class pet entrepreneurs actually want to go to.

“We contact ourselves a ‘pet city,’ but we currently lack the principal character of this kind of a city: animals,” says Chen Le, director of Shuitou Town’s financial advancement workplace, who isn’t relevant to Chen Zhenbiao or Chen Qun.

There were being in truth very number of canine on the streets when Sixth Tone frequented Shuitou in late May possibly. But the town is trying to make alone additional interesting to younger pet owners. The mountainside up coming to just one well-liked scenic location experienced been covered in pet-themed murals. The governing administration has ideas to established up puppy parks, pet-friendly resorts, and a pet exhibit. 

“If pet-pleasant accommodation doesn’t work out as very well as envisioned, people today can continue to remain in the homestays,” says Chen Le. “The expenditure and advantages are proportional.”

Petpal Tech also ideas to move into this location. Previous 12 months, the corporation co-hosted two pet-pleasant glamping situations, wherever a handful of hundred doggy house owners and their animals liked a day of frisbee video games, open up-air videos and live shows, and barbecue. It programs to hold yet another 5 equivalent occasions this yr.

“This form of exercise is in tune with dogs’ natures,” says Chen Zhenbiao.

Now 62, Chen Zhenbiao claims he nonetheless has no plans to retire any time before long. Finding out his phone, he displays Sixth Tone a picture of himself celebrating the birthdays of 3 of his pet dogs.

“I begun this 31 many years in the past to get out of poverty,” he claims. “But now I am deeply moved by the really like between people today and their animals, so I work since I appreciate it.”

Editor: Dominic Morgan.

(Header impression: Pet proprietors and their animals just take section in a pet exhibit in Pingyang County, Zhejiang province, 2017. Chang Kong/VCG)