Focus on: Business Strategies Twenty years of steady growth and smart acquisitions have propelled Doctors Foster & Smith to the top spot among pet-supply catalogers.

By Reported Donna Loyle

This is the tale of how two veterinarians went from selling mail-order pet vaccines from a back room in their clinic, to being the nation’s largest pet supply cataloger.

Drs. Race Foster and Marty Smith have spent the last 20 years engineering a company known for remarkable customer service, high-quality merchandise, efficient fulfillment operations and sound fiscal responsibility. Today, the veterinarians-turned-merchants own six catalog titles and four Web sites, and say they’ve never had an unprofitable quarter.