Petco is an American retailer of pet products founded in the mid-1960s. Today, Petco is one of the largest pet store chains in North and South America, with more than 1,500 retail stores in several countries. The retailer sells pet food, toys, and pet health products, and provides veterinary, training, and grooming services.
Meaning and history
Petco’s main motto is “Healthy pets. Happy People. A Better World”, and this motto has been followed since the company was founded in 1965. For 60 years Petco has not only sold products for pets and their owners but has been doing everything possible to make pets all over the world healthy and their owners happy.
Petco sells all kinds of pet products, including pet food, medications, healthy food, houses, toys, aquariums, and more. Moreover, Petco owns dog training centers and even a chain of pet beauty salons.
Since the inception of the business, Petco has transformed itself from a small local veterinary store to an established and integrated retailer of comprehensive pet care products. Unlike most competitors, Petco supplies the full range of products and services needed by pets, making them virtually unbeatable in the race for leadership in the pet sector.
In 1999, the Company established its non-profit Petco Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of pets. In addition, each year the company helps find homes for 400 thousand pets and monitors recycling efforts at the point of sale. The Foundation supports sterilization and conducts educational programs on the humane treatment of animals.
Today, Petco has more than 1,5 thousand stores in the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico, with more than 20,000 partners. Petco’s portfolio includes several dozen pet brands such as Bond & Co., Leaps & Bounds, Pals Rewards, Ruff & Mews, So Phresh, Vetco, and many others.
In terms of visual identity, Petco managed to find its unique style only at the end of the 1980s, and before the company was into experimenting with the logo. But it was also due to several name changes of the brand.
1965 – 1974
The company, known today as Petco, was established in 1965 under the name Upco Ranch & Kennel Supply, hence the lettering in the original logo of the firm was saying “Upco”, written in the lowercase of a slightly italicized and bold serif typeface. The wordmark was set in solid black against a golden background, with the first characters decorated by a stylized bird silhouette, flying upward. The logo stayed unchanged for almost ten years.
1974 – 1979
In 1974 the company was renamed into Upco Animal Supplies, and the logo was redesigned in the same year. The new badge featured a bold enlarged “Upco” lettering in the uppercase of a modern geometric sans-serif typeface, written in thick black bars against a transparent background and accompanied by the “Animal Supplies Unlimited” tagline written in small capitals of the same font.
1979 – 1989
The current name was adopted by the retailer in 1979, with the new logo introduced at the same time. It was still a black-and-white badge, yet the concept was significantly changed: now the stylized extra-heavy wordmark was accompanied not only by a stable and bold tagline, but also by a graphical part, which was composed of three contoured images: a horse, a cat, and a dog.
1989 – 2011
The first bright version of the Petco badge was created in 1989. It was a bold uppercase wordmark written in bright red against a transparent background, using a heavy and rounded sans-serif typeface. The softened contours of the letters looked friendly and fun, while the intense shade of red represented the passion and professionalism of the retailer.
1989 – 1991
Another Petco badge, designed at the end of the 1980s, featured the same style of lettering, as described above, yet here the red work was accompanied by a bright image of a red cat and a blue dog, peacefully sitting close to each other. The emblem was contoured in black and placed in the upper right corner of the composition.
1991 – 2011
The redesign of 1991 has played with the graphical part of the Petco visual identity, and only slightly refined the uppercase lettering by cleaning the contours of the rounded characters and intensifying the shade of red. The new emblem had more cartoonish shapes of the animals and was now placed at the bottom right corner of the logo, overlapping the right part of the “O” in the wordmark.
2011 – 2020
In 2011 the emblem, designed in 1991 moved to the right from the rewritten lettering and was set at a significant distance from the last character of the wordmark. The inscription was now set in the lowercase of an elegantly modified Museo Sans typeface, with the letters having a lot of space between each other. This version of the logo was used by the company until the beginning of the 2020s.
2020 – Today
The redesign of 2020 has switched the color palette of the Petco visual identity to navy blue, and the primary version of the logo now features just the lowercase lettering, written in a fancy sans-serif typeface against a plain white background. However, the emblem with the car and dog is still used by the brand, but in the refined version, the friendly animals are contoured in blue, with their bodies staying white.
Font and color
The bold lowercase lettering from the primary logo of the Petco company is set in an elegant sans-serif typeface, which is the modified version of the LL Circular font. The main peculiarities of the wordmark are the softened part of the “P” ‘s tail, and the thickened hat above the “T”.
As for the color palette of Petco’s visual identity, since the beginning of the 2020s, it has been based on a strict yet sleek combination of dark blue and white, which looks professional, confident, and exquisite.