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

In January, DFS started a new program, Automatic Reship, in which customers sign up to have certain products, most notably consumables such as pet treats and food, automatically shipped to them on pre-set schedules. The impetus to this was the unveiling of the cataloger’s new private-label brand of pet food. When determining a marketing strategy for the new line, Voellinger says, “We saw that some competitors were selling the bottomless-bowl concept. We thought we should offer that, too. People are signing up like crazy for it. In fact, sign-ups have gone well beyond our expectations.” Thus, although the cataloger gets bigger with each passing year, it never loses sight of its main mission: To serve customers so well they’ll never want to shop anywhere else.