Thailand's Falling Birth Rate Is Fueling a Pet Care Boom

Thailand had fewer than 100,000 babies born in the first quarter of 2025, while more than 147,000 people died in the same stretch. That gap has been widening since the country's population started shrinking in 2020. Over the same years, a different number has been climbing fast: pet spending, which reached an estimated 75 billion baht in 2024, up 12.4% from the year before, according to industry data reported by Nation Thailand and Khaosod English. One business bet on that swap a decade before the trend had a name: PetClub, a Bangkok pet care chain that now runs roughly 30 stores, a grooming service, a veterinary practice, and a pet hotel, built by a co-founder who started with a single shophouse because no mall would take her.

Mrs. Pook, PetClub's co-founder, told the story on a recent episode of Students Incorporated, the podcast produced by students at the International Community School of Bangkok. Her account of building the company doubles as an anatomy of how Thailand's pet economy actually got this big: not through a single clever marketing campaign, but through a decade of demographic change that quietly rewired what Thai households spend money on.

A market built on fewer babies and more dogs

The numbers behind the shift are stark. Thailand's total fertility rate fell from 6.4 births per woman in 1964 to 1.46 in 2023, according to reporting from VOA News, and multiple outlets have since put the current rate below 1, deep into territory demographers consider a population crisis. Bangkok Post reporting notes diaper sales dropped 20 to 30% year-on-year in early 2025, even as pet spending kept climbing. A study by Mahidol University's College of Management, cited in that same Bangkok Post coverage, found that 49% of Thai pet owners say they treat their pets like children, and 53% consider them full members of the family.

Market researchers call this "pet humanisation," a global pattern showing up anywhere birth rates fall and disposable income rises. Thailand's version is unusually fast: the pet population is now estimated at around 20 million animals, split roughly 12 million dogs to 8 million cats. That's the backdrop PetClub operates against, though Mrs. Pook was building the company before anyone had a name for the trend.

From a roadside shophouse to a phone that finally rang

Mrs. Pook's own path into the pet industry ran through market research, not animals. She studied business and statistics at Chulalongkorn University, earned a master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then landed her first job in Procter & Gamble's Thailand market research division, work that included helping launch Pampers in the Thai market, an irony given she'd go on to build a company that thrives partly because fewer Thai parents buy diapers at all. She later joined her family's business before starting PetClub roughly a decade before the episode aired.

The early going was rough in a specific, telling way. "It's very difficult for us to land the first door," she said of the company's early search for retail space. Landlords and malls turned her down outright: pet retail wasn't an established category yet, and no one could picture a dedicated pet store inside a nice mall. PetClub opened its first location in a shophouse instead, street-level retail that doesn't require convincing a mall operator of anything. It took years before the calls started coming from the other direction: malls and landlords reaching out to ask if PetClub wanted space. She calls that reversal, going from rejected applicant to recruited tenant, the real turning point, because it meant the market itself had shifted underneath her.

That mirrors a broader retail pattern now visible across Bangkok. Malls including CentralWorld and the newer One Bangkok development have leaned into pet-friendly design (open walkways pets can move through, cafés that welcome them), treating animal companions as a mainstream part of the shopping public rather than an exception to be managed. A business that malls wouldn't touch in the 2010s is now a category some of them compete to host.

More competitors, not less confidence

Growth like that draws newcomers, and Mrs. Pook says she's watched the field around PetClub get more crowded every year as the pet economy has scaled. Industry analysts expect the crowding to continue: Grand View Research projects Thailand's pet services market will grow at a compound annual rate of roughly 11% through 2030, with the broader pet care market estimated at around $2 billion in 2025. For many owners, more competitors chasing the same customers would read as a warning sign. Mrs. Pook frames it as the opposite: proof the bet was right. "If you look around yourself, and it's only you competing in that industry, you should ask yourself, why are you there?" she said, arguing that a growing crowd of entrants confirms a market is worth being in, and that the real competitive question isn't whether others show up but whether PetClub keeps improving enough to hold its position.

Dreams will just become a dream without actions.

Caring for inventory that has bad days

Running a company built around live animals creates problems an ordinary retailer never has to solve. Mrs. Pook described grooming appointments that run long because a dog got spooked by a loud noise, or a cat that was easy to handle last visit and anxious this one, with no clean explanation for the customer beyond "it's not a dog, it's this dog, today." Her answer isn't a policy fix; it's blunt communication. "What we're trying to do is to be open and tell them straightforward what happened," she said, describing a business built on managing expectations as much as managing animals, because the customer isn't just buying a service, they're trusting someone else with a family member.

That tension, a service built around something that can get anxious, get sick, or have an off day, is arguably the least automatable part of the pet economy's growth story. It's where PetClub's five-part model (retail, grooming, veterinary care, boarding, and a swimming pool for dogs) does real work: enough touchpoints to absorb the unpredictability of live-animal service rather than get blindsided by it store by store.

What a decade of growth taught her about staying in it

Asked what advice she'd give young entrepreneurs, Mrs. Pook didn't reach for a growth hack. She talked about giving up a steady paycheck to fund the company's early years, about "burning your savings," and treating every setback as raw material rather than a verdict. She closed with a line from Winston Churchill she says she repeats to young entrepreneurs regularly: success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.

Her advice to the students interviewing her was narrower but pointed at the same idea. Explore broadly before committing, she said, and pay attention to what you find yourself actively disliking, not just what you enjoy, because a career, like a business, is something you have to be willing to do "day in, day out," long after the novelty wears off. She told the students she never had a class like theirs in high school, one built around exploring real industries by talking directly with the people working in them, and called the opportunity "amazing."

It's a fitting note for a company that spent years being told no by an industry that didn't yet believe pets were worth building retail space around. Thailand's fertility rate isn't reversing course anytime soon (the government has floated new family-support policies, per reporting from Thai Examiner), and pet ownership shows no sign of slowing down as families shrink and pets fill the gap. What Mrs. Pook's story argues is that businesses built to last through that kind of shift are the ones that took it seriously before the market data caught up.

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