American premium pet food brand Timberwolf showed its wild side at Pet Fair Asia 2023 in Shanghai last month, with colorful displays featuring the predatory ancestors of our modern fur babies.
The event, which marked its 25-year anniversary this year, is the largest pet supply exhibition in Asia and drew more than 250,000 visitors to see 2,200 exhibitors over four days.
For first-time joiner Timberwolf, this was a moment 15 years in the making.
The brand launched in China in 2008 but struggled to gain a foothold among local consumers until three years ago when Timberwolf partnered with cross-border marketplace Tmall Global to broaden its reach.
“We chose Tmall Global because they provided us with the tools we needed to succeed as a smaller brand,” said Kam Martin, the chief operating officer of Timberwolf, in an interview with Alizila.
Now, Timberwolf has become one of the fastest-growing pet food brands in China.
The success encouraged Kam and his team to expand its global team and roll out more products for Chinese consumers.
Below is a transcript of this video, edited for clarity and brevity
Kam Martin: Timberwolf is a 25-year-old brand based in the United States. We’re known for combining premium proteins along with natural herbs. This provides a distinctive taste experience and also a distinctive smell experience for pets.
We’ve partnered with manufacturers who are also based in the heartland of the United States. Our focus is sourcing premium ingredients and exporting them around the world.
We’re at the 25th annual Pet Fair Asia based in Shanghai, China. It’s actually the largest pet show in the world. So, over the next five days, 250,000 pet enthusiasts will come here. This is our first time here at the show, so we’re proud to be welcomed with open arms.
Timberwolf has a 15-year history here in China. In the beginning, Timberwolf actually struggled to really connect with pet parents and really get education about our product across. We really didn’t enter the modern e-commerce pet channel here until 2020.
We understood that if we wanted to succeed here in China, we needed to partner alongside Alibaba and their platforms and their tools. We chose Tmall Global because they provided us with the tools we needed to succeed as a smaller brand. They allowed us to engage with our end consumers, which is unlike what you see from other platforms.
After joining Tmall Global, we were actually able to export seven figures worth of products to the Chinese pet market. Since then, we’ve become one of the fastest-growing pet products here in the Chinese market, imported from the USA, and we remain in that position today.
The success of Timberwolf in China has actually had a domino effect.
Due to our success in China, Timberwolf has actually been able to expand our global team. In the United States, we’ve actually added additional offices. We’ve also seen our production over the years double.
Over the next year, Timberwolf expects to add additional product categories. We expect to see the same amount of growth that we saw with our original product lines.
