In March 2021, a few months after its IPO, Petz told the market where it wanted to be: recognized worldwide as the best ecosystem in the pet segment by 2025. It was a bold sentence for a company that most Brazilians still knew as the big yellow pet store. Over the next two years the group bought Zee.Dog, Cansei de Ser Gato, Cão Cidadão and Petix, opened a veterinary network, grew grooming, adoption, content and training, and more than doubled its revenue. The business became the ecosystem the sentence described. The brand did not. The logo on the door was the one drawn in 2014 for a chain of stores, and every new thing the company built had to be squeezed into it. The refresh started from a diagnosis that was strategic before it was visual: the brand had become the bottleneck of the vision.
Why a new brand
We read the vision word by word and asked what each word demanded from the brand.
"Worldwide" meant an identity that could be accepted and valued outside Brazil.
"Recognized" meant more than recall; Petz was already top of mind, and the next step was to become a brand people love.
"Best" meant the ability to build and sign the best own-brand products, because an ecosystem that only resells other people's products has no edge.
"Ecosystem" meant a brand that could integrate every channel and every service under one idea, physically and digitally.
None of those four things was possible with the 2014 identity. That was the case for a refresh, and it was made in those terms, to a leadership team that thinks in strategy, not in aesthetics.
The second half of the argument was competitive. We mapped the field on three axes: services, own products and physical presence. The marketplaces, Mercado Livre and Amazon, had none of the three. The specialist chains had services, but limited and not integrated, and none had become a love brand. The digital-native pet player had limited services and limited own product. Petz was the only company with all three ingredients, and a brand that communicated none of it. The gap between what Petz was and what it looked like was the opportunity.
The third half, for the skeptics, was precedent.
Apple refreshed when it entered the digital world.
Starbucks refreshed to become a global brand.
Walmart refreshed, tagline and stores included, to differentiate itself from Amazon.
Petz needed all three moves at once: digital, global, and differentiation from a marketplace. It had renewed its brand once before, in 2014, when Pet Center Marginal became Petz. Ten years later the company had changed shape again.
From today to the future
The refresh was framed as continuity with ambition, and we wrote it as a table.
What stays:
omnichannel, welcoming and charismatic.
What evolves:
Own product becomes 100% in-house design across all categories;
Recognizable becomes love brand;
Best offer becomes best offer with products exclusive to Petz;
Pet services become a fully integrated ecosystem in a super app;
Pet expert becomes pet expert physical and digital, through Petz TV and Dr. Pet.
Everything the company already stood for was kept. Everything it wanted to become was added. The brand was the instrument that would make the second colurowmn real.
Because an ecosystem is experienced everywhere, the refresh was designed against every point of contact at once, split in two families. Intangible: communication and digital. Tangible: spaces and products. Each family got its own pillar in the new brand, and each pillar had a strategic job.
Charismatic and democratic: the communication pillar
The first thing the new brand had to do was keep what people liked. Petz was warm and accessible, and a refresh that felt cold or premium would have traded away its largest asset.
The charisma moved from the logo into a system of characters: a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a reptile, a bird, a fish, drawn from simple shapes with the same half-moon eyes, in a fixed set of flat colors.
People connect with characters more than with logos, and the characters do a positioning job on their own: they make it visible that Petz is a place for every kind of animal, which is exactly what the new promise says.
The signature changed with the promise. "O seu pet center de estimação" described a store. The refresh proposed "Tudo pro seu pet em um só lugar", and the launch landed on "Tudo que seu pet precisa." It describes an ecosystem.
The photography followed the same idea. We wrote the direction as much in negatives as in positives: the pet is relaxed and natural, never posed, never in a cage, never a pedigree, always with a person in frame, in ordinary homes with wood, plants and daylight. Young, contemporary, spontaneous, indoor, mixed-breed. A brand for the people who actually live with animals.
Iconic: the product pillar
This is where the refresh carried the most business weight. Own-brand products had an attractive margin and a small share of revenue, and the group's stated plan was to double that share. The strategy was to move the Petz-branded line to a "better" position in the good, better, best ladder, leaving room for other own brands at entry prices, with the goal of reaching up to 80% own product across categories. A brand cannot do that if it looks like a store logo stamped on a bowl.
The new wordmark and the compact "P." mark were designed to be a product signature. The ambition we stated for the "P." was for it to become as iconic as Apple's apple or McDonald's arches: a mark that identifies Petz on a tag, a buckle or an app icon and differentiates it at the same time. The four-color system was built to look right molded, stitched and embroidered, and the first collections showed the range, from a natural line in undyed tones to reflective, fluorescent and pastel. Essential products, with desirable design, at accessible prices. A well-positioned brand also opens the door to collaborations with other strong brands, which feed a cycle of relevance and desire that spills over into every other purchase decision at Petz versus a competitor.
Each service had its own strategic reason to be there. Seres could draw on the app's organic traffic to fill appointments. Adote Petz is an acquisition tool, turning a shopping visit into an adoption in one or two taps. Petz TV had the mission of becoming the largest source of truth on pet subjects in Brazil, with monetization potential in the medium term. Dr. Pet brought the strongest name in dog training in the country into the journey; the refresh proposed carrying the Dr. Pet and Alexandre Rossi name over the previous Cão Cidadão brand for recall. The super app made all of this a single model in the customer's head: everything your pet needs, one click away.
The same system reached the physical store, because a brand that changes on the phone and stays the same in the aisle is two brands. Facades, pylon signs listing the ecosystem, category headers in the characters' colors, product walls built around the own-brand line.
My role
I was the design lead for product and brand on the refresh, working inside Petz Innovation Studio, an innovation front the group created after acquiring Zee.Dog, staffed with Zee.Dog's creative team and tasked with coordinating the brand turnaround. I coordinated the work across product and brand, owned the visual craft of the new identity, and created the super app.
The job was to hold one system across a leadership team, a marketing team that owned positioning and campaign, product and engineering teams responsible for the app, retail and visual merchandising, the own-brand product team, and the leaders of each acquired service, who had to accept a shared frame around brands they had built. The Innovation Studio was the mechanism that made this possible: a small creative unit with the company's mandate behind it.
Launch and results
The new brand was announced in October 2023, with a national campaign, "Geração P", that premiered during Fantástico on Globo, and a new signature, "Tudo que seu pet precisa." With the launch, Seres veterinary services became accessible inside the Petz shopping app for the first time, the loyalty program was rebuilt as Clubz, and stores began to be reformulated under the new system. The company presented the refresh to the market as the moment it stopped being only a retailer and became an ecosystem of products and services, integrating the acquisitions under one identity.
The refresh answered the question the vision had left open. Digital ready, so the ecosystem could be integrated. Global, so the brand could be respected where the company wanted to grow. Own product, so Petz could sign what it sells. The logo and the palette are what people saw in October 2023. The work was giving a company that had already changed shape a brand that could finally say so.