pet connection

In the middle of the seven football fields worth of pet products, the big companies have the prime real estate, with massive booths bigger than many houses and hundreds of products on display. These folks have the experience and the money that it takes to bring a new product to market, and they do it every year. Some products do well, and become a regular part of a big company’s line. A few flop and never show up at another trade show. The big companies don’t like a flop, to be sure, but they’re prepared for them, and they take it all in stride.

While no one covering Global Pet Expo can skip the big players, the booths I most like visiting are the small ones on the edges of the cavernous show floor. It’s here you’ll find the start-ups, the dreamers, the entrepreneurs. Some of them have been in the pet business before and some have not, some have been in business for themselves before and some have not.

But they’re all putting everything they’ve got into a small booth on the edges, and I like that. A lot.

Not to mention, year after year I find some of the most innovative products from these entrepreneurs. This year was no different.

The entire Pet Connection team here — Dr. Becker, me, Mikkel Becker Shannon, David Greene and our newest blogger, Ericka Basile, met at 6 a.m. this morning to hash out the final list of Dr. Becker’s Best for his piece on ABC News Now. But when that was done, we all went back out onto the floor to each give a little love to some of the ones we’d each liked but that didn’t (in most cases) make the final 10.

You can scroll back to see what everyone liked, and to see Dr. Becker’s Best as well. So I’m going to wrap up the day with a couple of products I really liked, on the edges of the trade show floor I think of as “Entrepreneur Alley.” In no particular order:

Molly Mutt dog duvets. I have dog beds all over the house, and over the years I have sadly tossed dozens of them because they couldn’t really be cleaned. And sometimes, they ended up replaced just because I was tired of looking at them. The beds from Molly Mutt give you options — lots and lots of options — and allow you to do some recycling while doing so. Choose a bed cover, unstuffed ($20-$45). Add a stuff-it bag ($10-15, optional) to go inside. Then take all those battered old linens (towels, old blankets) you were going to toss and make a bed — stuff it, in other words. Every piece is washable, and you can change covers whenever you like. Lots of stylish options, too. Great concept, and I think this one is going to sell.

Paper Russells welcome mats. I was going to like this product, since I’ve bought note cards and a couple of magnets from this company. I really can’t wait to get the muddy black retriever door mat, one of several colorful and well-made in a very nice line. I can’t find the suggested retail in my notes, but I’m thinking it was in the neighborhood of $30. The mats aren’t on their Web site yet, but check out their other attractive products and watch for the mats to show up in retailers soon.

The Refined Feline cat furniture. The cats love the cat tree, but dang the thing is ugly. Now that I work at home all the time, I have to admit I’m less interested in looking at ugly than ever before. Is there something that can give a cat a lofty perch and some scratching surfaces without looking like the whole shebang was put together from scrap wood and old shag carpet from the set of “The Brady Bunch”?

Turns out there is. Although a few companies offered feline furniture — mostly to hide litter boxes — to my eye The Refined Feline had the best looking products. The lines were clean and simple, and well suited to letting your cat’s natural beauty shine. You know how important that is to your cat, and the fact is that an upgrade of surroundings is good for your both. Check out the entire line here.

I have a few more, but I’ll save those for later posts, after I get back to California and review my notes. Global Pet Expo gets bigger every year, and the size of the pet industry continues to astound — sales topped $45 billion with barely a burp during 2009 — yes, in a recession — and are on track to hit $46.7 billion in 2010.

That’s it for us for this show. As I walked back after watching Dr. Becker and Mikkel tape their “Dr. Becker’s Best” segment for ABC News Now — one of something in the neighborhood of 40 they recorded from the new “The Pet Doctor With Dr. Marty Becker” series coming on ABC News Now — I stopped in once again to visit the ducks in the lobby here at The Peabody.

They were all doing what I wanted to be doing: Napping.  These huge events even wear out the ducks, it seems.

Top picture: The PetConnection crew at Global Pet Expo: David Greene, Gina Spadafori, Dr. Marty Becker, Mikkel Becker Shannon and Ericka Basile. Our Liz Palika was here, too, but we barely saw her, since she was busy wearing one of her other hats, working for Pet Life Radio. And back in California, the utterly blogerific Christie Keith stopped adoring her new puppy to work on coordinating it all.

Update: We made it downstairs to see The March of The Peabody Ducks one last time. I even remembered to use the video recorder on the iPhone. Enjoy!  (And here’s the story of the ducks, a delightful tradition that started at the original Peabody Hotel, in Memphis. )

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