How luxury pet brand Vetreska by Singaporean Donald Kng built an international following

It’s like I’d stumbled upon a daycare centre for child influencers. Facing a playpen were fruit-themed items arrayed like objets d’art in a Warhol-inspired exhibition, against a candy-coloured backdrop. I then entered an inner chamber where clients were buffed and preened after their mud baths. They looked up insouciantly, unfazed by an ogling audience. You could even say that the little sybarites barely acknowledged my intrusion, except for their twitching noses and wagging tails.
This is what pampering your pooches looks like in the age of social media dominance, and FUR — a pet boutique, spa and daycare centre by global pet firm Vetreska — appears to have it down pat. Its slick branding, according to CEO Donald Kng, is like catnip to legions of financially independent women. The Singaporean started the company with Chinese national Nico Li as students at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where they’d identified a surging interest in pets while researching female consumption patterns.
“The pet industry represented the best canvas for us to implement that whole feminine, well-designed, quirky women’s angle,” said Kng. “We take elements from popular culture, societal keywords and hashtags, and reimagine them into pet products,” he added. Li designs the accessories, while they curate their food and wellness products from various suppliers.
Popular creations range from their cactus-shaped cat scratching post to a ceramic feeding bowl and stand. The latter is part of their cheerful Chroma range crafted in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in America. Other juggernaut partners include KFC and Disney Pixar, which previously engaged Vetreska exclusively for its pet product line in the Greater China region.
AN UNLIKELY MUSE
While those big-name clients are arguably worth flexing over, a pet brand is an unlikely brainchild of graduates from FIT, which counts design luminaries Calvin Klein and Michael Kors among its alumni. And Kng and Li, with their swish monochromatic ensembles, look more at home at the sidelines of a fashion show than their kitschy-cute flagship store that opened in pet-friendly mall One Holland Village in 2023.
The 34-year-old, whose father and mother work in the oil industry and military respectively, scuttled his plans to study economics in the UK to pursue his love of fashion. He’d always cut against the grain, having never fit into the tightly prescribed culture of his alma mater Hwa Chong Junior College.
“Being there helped me develop critical thinking skills — and also informed me that I did not ever want to be in such a strict, regimented environment again,” he said. As an adolescent, he nursed his creative bent by poring over fashion magazines and scoping out stores at Orchard Road with his mother to “really feel the clothes and smell all the different perfumes.”
Admittedly, starting a luxury pet lifestyle business wasn’t what Kng had in mind when he’d entered the orbit of the sartorially inclined.
“By senior year in university, you realise that the fashion industry is 90 per cent Excel work and 10 per cent fashion shows, which you don’t really get to enjoy backstage,” said Kng, who majored in fashion merchandising and worked at French maison Roger Vivier shortly after graduating. The duo started Vetreska as a boutique design studio in their senior year, “to earn extra income to go drinking.”
They alighted on the idea of a high-end pet brand in 2017 and moved the company to Shanghai. There, they raised some US$76 million (S$100.17 million) over eight rounds from investment firms including IDG Capital and ClearVue Partners. It’s an impressive feat, considering that many start-ups have gotten the short shrift from cautious investors due to a bearish economy reeling from the pandemic.
THE PURR-FECT BUSINESS PLAN
So, what makes a winning pitch in an increasingly formidable dragon’s den breathing scepticism? Kng, who oversees the firm’s capital markets, is no stranger to tough questions posed by prospective investors. “What reach can you achieve in an industry where there are already big players like Mars and Nestle? How defensible is a well-designed product in a place like China, where counterfeiting is the norm?” he recounted.
The duo hedged their bets on building brand loyalty. “It has to mean something to a customer that they can own an authentic product, just like a Chanel or Louis Vuitton,” he asserted. Playing to this strategy has, according to Kng, earned them a loyal following of predominantly female customers willing to splash out on Instagrammable pet accessories. They didn’t start out making money hand over fist, though.
“We moved to Shanghai with the idea of bringing the whole US culture of super foods and using KOL (Key Opinion Leader) and fashionable marketing, but it was a little too avant-garde for the Chinese market,” he revealed. So, they scoured pet fairs and brought back novelty edible items such as treats in bubble tea packaging, ice-cream and non-alcoholic wine for cats, which were met with runaway success in China.
“We realised that humanisation of pet products is the way to go, but you have to ensure that it fits the culture of your audience,” said Kng.
Along the way, the firm also streamlined its design process, after a costly lesson whereby manufacturers bungled the production of a particularly complicated cat litter box with multiple components. “We pre-sold some 1,000 pieces during Pet Fair Asia 2018, but the factories couldn’t deliver — drawers were getting stuck, and doors were falling off. We scrapped the design after spending around RMB 800,000 (US$112,536; S$148,330) just on moulds,” he recounted ruefully.
The young co-founders’ animating goal has always been profitability, though. From the jump, they focused on maintaining healthy cashflow through the B2B segment, plying pet fairs to solicit distributors who would stock their inventory without trade terms. “We used our margins to help them market our products. It was only when the total value of our products in circulation exceeded RMB 200 million that we started our own online store,” he shared.
Since then, they haven’t taken their foot off the pedal, with a growing footprint in the US; China; South America; Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Doting ‘pawrents,’ it would appear, are a universal fixture.
BANKING ON PET HUMANISATION
While pet humanisation — whereby cossetted fur-kids are regarded as bona fide family members — is the cornerstone of a booming pet industry, the company takes the trend to the next level. Could we interest Mr Mittens the feline in joining the family’s Chinese New Year reunion with his own freeze-dried hot pot? Would Larry the Labradoodle care to be lovingly fed from a cherry-shaped bowl kitted out with a stalk-like spoon?
Such a flair for whimsy is a far cry from the days where house brand kibble was the norm, rather than frowned upon by finicky pet owners. Kng acknowledges that this paradigm shift has, to a large extent, been driven by savvy marketers. “Pet consumption is essentially emotional consumption — being able to identify what goes into the whole emotional aspect of having a pet naturally brings in sales.”
The owner of four dogs and two cats can certainly appreciate the notion of sparing no expense for your furry companions, having lavished Celine feeding bowls and Goyard leashes on his brood. Like most, he instantly drops his froideur when talking about his beloved pets. There’s an Alaskan Malamute who basks in an air-conditioned environment all day, a corpulent Labrador who “formulates all sorts of plans to get extra food” and a stray mutt he rescued during a thunderstorm.
“One Chinese New Year, our Labrador finished all the other dogs’ food when we weren’t around, and we had to rush him to the vet because his tummy was so bloated,” he recalled, laughing.
Pet lovers will tell you it’s such quirks that have them enamoured and unsparing in their affections. Singaporean owners, for one, are particularly indulgent, according to Kng — who has plans to duplicate Vetreska’s Henan factory somewhere in South-east Asia, as well as open a second Singapore store next year. He’s confident that Vetreska’s branding as a ‘people pet brand’ will resonate with local consumers.
“It’s really about bridging that emotional connection between people and their pets. It’s that bond that helps reimagine what life with a pet could potentially look like,” he mused.