Pet Stores Relying on Summer Grooming & Winter Boarding: Why They Struggle To Survive The Cycle

“Every year, I’m not afraid of slow business, but of too busy business.” When Lao Zhou, owner of a pet store in Tongzhou, Beijing, said this, his eyes showed exhaustion rather than vanity. Right after the Spring Festival, his store emptied drastically. “I’ve run this store for nine years, and it’s the same every year—boarding and grooming orders are fully booked before the holiday, but after the holiday, orders plummet, and another long ‘winter slump’ begins.”

This is not Lao Zhou’s alone. Seasonal fluctuations in the pet industry are like an invisible sieve, filtering out those who are unprepared year after year. More cruelly, the money pet stores earn in peak seasons such as the Spring Festival and National Day is often eaten away little by little by rent, labor and inventory in off-seasons. When the money earned in peak seasons is spent and the gaps in off-seasons cannot be filled, pet store owners collapse, and the industry starts a new round of reshuffling.

This is the underlying logic why a large number of new stores open and close every year. So some people say that those stores that rely on summer grooming and winter boarding are experiencing a race against time about cash flow. The subsequent question is, how can pet stores get rid of the cycle of “seasonal business” and achieve sustainable and healthy development by smoothing cash flow throughout the year?

If we compare a pet store’s annual business to a line, its characteristic may be orderly ups and downs with distinct peaks and valleys. Among them:

The 45 days before the Spring Festival are probably the busiest time of the year. Sister Liu, owner of a pet store in Chaoyang, Beijing, told Pet Industry Observer that boarding reservations for this Spring Festival were fully booked starting from December. Regular customers paid deposits a month in advance just to secure a spot. The price of bathing and grooming increased by 30%, but appointments were still scheduled until 10 pm. During that period, she and two groomers worked 14 hours a day, always eating takeout for lunch and barely having time to drink water.

“At that time, there was only one thing on my mind: faster, faster. Money was really flying in front of me, and you could grab it with your hand,” she said.

But right after the Spring Festival, a cliff-like drop came. The boarding area was empty, groomers started taking turns off, and the store’s business volume dropped sharply. This situation lasts until around May and June. With the rise in demand for deworming and outdoor activities, the business volume of commodity retail and services will also pick up in July and August. But then September is another off-season.

When the weather continues to cool down, business starts to recover in October and November. Coupled with the Double 11 and Double 12 e-commerce promotions, the store can also get some traffic. But the real second peak comes in late December—when the reservation calls for Spring Festival boarding ring again.

Many pet store owners can draw this rhythm with their eyes closed. But knowing the rules is one thing, and how to get through the cycle is another. So why do seasonal fluctuations become a fatal blow to pet stores? How can we get through such cyclical fluctuations?

Industry experts point out that the fatal blow of seasonal fluctuations to pet stores is seemingly affected by the cycle of seasons, weather and holidays, but there are also several structural contradictions hidden at a deeper level:

First of all, the cost structure of pet stores is inherently rigid. Rent is signed annually and will not be halved because business is poor; employee salaries are paid monthly and will not be discounted by 20% because there are fewer customers; water and electricity bills, social security and consumables—none of them can be saved. However, the revenue side is extremely elastic—it may triple in peak seasons and be halved again and again in off-seasons.

This contradiction between rigid costs and elastic revenue is often the first mountain that crushes stores. Because the revenue of pet stores is inherently prone to drastic fluctuations. The existence of rigid costs determines that fluctuations will inevitably be converted into cash flow pressure. So the key to this problem is not to eliminate fluctuations, which is unlikely, but to maintain cash flow balance amid fluctuations.

If rigid costs are an obvious threat, then inventory problems are a hidden one. A large amount of stock is needed in peak seasons to avoid stockouts; in off-seasons, goods are stuck in the warehouse, and every extra day they stay increases the risk of becoming short-dated products. After inventory has been overstocked for more than 6 months, discounted disposal is inevitable.

The root cause of this problem is: orders must be placed in advance, but demand fluctuates in real time. Whether consumers will buy it can only be truly seen after the products are put on the shelves. This time gap is the source of inventory risk.

In addition, the inventory risk of seasonal products is more obvious. A Kun, a pet store owner in Guangzhou, stocked a batch of “New Year limited gift boxes” before the Spring Festival last year—dog food and cat cans in red festive packaging, with a purchase price of 75 yuan and a selling price of 198 yuan, which seemed to have considerable profits. As a result, by the 15th day of the first lunar month, 60% of the goods were still left. He tried to reduce the price to 99 yuan, but they still didn’t sell. In March, these gift boxes had to be unpacked and sold as ordinary goods, with a discount loss of more than 40%.

This is the “time trap” of seasonal products—they can only be sold in a specific window period, and after the window closes, their value drops sharply. Gift boxes, seasonal foods and holiday-limited supplies in the pet industry all follow this logic. According to data from Shushangyun, the inventory turnover days of seasonal products in off-seasons exceed 90 days, and unsold products account for as high as 35%. These figures, when applied to individual stores, may be a true portrayal of “surviving the peak season but dying in the off-season.”

A more hidden and fatal structural contradiction may be the fluctuation and dispersion of the team’s labor load, which has long been destroying the most valuable asset of the store: the stability of service quality and word of mouth. In peak seasons, employees work overtime, physically and mentally exhausted; in off-seasons, their income drops, and their morale fluctuates. Many pet store employees resign because of this. Once the team disperses, when the next peak season comes, new recruits have to be retrained, service quality is uneven, and regular customers start to leave.

This is a vicious circle: employees are exhausted in peak seasons, hard to retain in off-seasons, new recruits have to be hired again in the next peak season, service quality is always unstable, and there are fewer and fewer customers.

So, in the face of the operational dilemma caused by the superposition of these three contradictions, are there any truly effective solutions?

Through research on a number of pet stores that have survived for more than eight years, we found that most of the stores that successfully got through the cycle have established a set of “anti-seasonal logic”—no longer passively responding to the cycle, but actively managing it. Among them:

First, turn peak seasons into “customer retention seasons.” The greatest value of peak seasons is not to earn high grooming fees for a few days, but to acquire new customers and retain old ones.

Take boarding orders during the Spring Festival as an example. Most of these are young people returning to their hometowns for the holiday, and some may not even live nearby usually. But the fact that they can send their pets to the store during the Spring Festival shows that they have a certain degree of trust in the store. At this time, launching a sincere package or a membership system covering the whole year usually has a very high conversion rate.

The owner of a pet store in Hangzhou adopted this strategy this year—allowing users to recharge a certain amount at one time. Not only did the grooming and boarding prices not increase during the Spring Festival, but three unlimited grooming services were also given as gifts. In the end, the pre-deposit amount received before the Spring Festival reached about 200,000 yuan, reserving sufficient cash flow for the off-season.

He summarized this strategy as “not greedy for profits in peak seasons, but greedy for hearts”—not greedy for short-term profits brought by high prices in peak seasons, but greedy for the long-term goal of locking in customers. More importantly, those customers who have recharged will come to consume from time to time in off-seasons, because the money has already been spent, and they will lose out if they don’t come.

Second, turn off-seasons into “in-depth cultivation seasons.” “Off-seasons are not without demand, but the form of demand changes.” Lao Wu, a pet store owner in Suzhou, told Pet Industry Observer that last June, his store launched a “summer health screening” activity: free skin checks for pets entering the store, recommending corresponding products if problems are found, and turning grooming from a cleaning service into an entrance for health screening. As a result, the average customer price in the off-season was 30% higher than that in the peak season.

Lao Wu summarized: “In peak seasons, people want convenience and speed; in off-seasons, people have time and want quality. If you do ‘quality’ well, price is not a problem.”

Third, turn inventory and labor into assets rather than costs. In terms of inventory management, the traditional ordering mode relies more on experience judgment—how much to stock, what to stock, and when to stock. However, the accuracy rate of experience is often less than 50%.

Sister Chen, a pet store owner in Wuhan, installed an inventory management system two years ago, which cost less than 3,000 yuan. Her feeling after using it for a year was: “Before, how much to stock was all based on ‘I think’; now the system tells me ‘you should stock’ or ‘don’t stock.’ Listening to the system, inventory has decreased by 30%, and capital turnover has accelerated by two months.”

She also explored a set of “multi-skilled worker” system in manpower allocation—each employee must learn at least three skills such as grooming, beauty and commodity sales, so that they can be flexibly deployed in peak seasons and undertake more types of services in off-seasons.

More importantly, she insists on paying basic wages to core employees in off-seasons and does not lay off staff. She said: “Keeping people in off-seasons is to be able to fight in peak seasons. Losing a core employee costs far more in customer trust and training costs than a few months’ wages.”