Founder and CEO of Enjoy Pets, Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, gets some version of this question constantly from people considering their own move into the pet market: hasn’t the moment already passed? The sector grew so fast for a few years that it is easy to assume the window for a new entrant has quietly closed. The answer is more encouraging than the question assumes, but it comes with a real condition attached.
Why the question feels urgent right now
Brazil’s pet sector moved through an unusually fast expansion between 2020 and 2022, growing at more than fifteen percent a year and turning the country into one of the largest pet markets in the world. Today the sector is worth around eighty billion reais annually. Numbers like that create a natural anxiety for anyone thinking about entering now: if the fastest growth already happened, does joining today just mean fighting over scraps that established players have already claimed?
That framing misreads what actually happened. Hugo Galvao states that the sector did not move from wide open to fully claimed. It moved from an early land-grab phase into a more mature, more demanding one.
What a market this size still leaves on the table
Even with double-digit growth behind it, Brazil’s pet retail sector remains notably fragmented. The country’s largest dedicated pet retailer operates roughly one hundred and thirty stores nationally, a modest footprint for a market of this scale, and historically the top five companies across the broader pet care category have controlled little more than half of total sales between them. That leaves an enormous share of the market spread across smaller, regional and specialized players, exactly the kind of landscape where a focused new entrant can still carve out real space.
To Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, a market controlled by two or three dominant players leaves little room for anyone else. A market this fragmented, growing steadily even after its fastest phase, is a different situation entirely.
What actually determines who succeeds now
The businesses struggling in this market today are not struggling because they arrived too late. They are struggling because they entered with the same playbook that worked during the fastest growth years, when almost any reasonably run pet business could grow just by riding the sector’s momentum. That playbook does not work as well once growth slows to a steadier pace, because rising demand alone is no longer enough to cover for a weak differentiation strategy, thin logistics or an undefined customer experience.
What separates a business that thrives from one that stalls now has much less to do with when it launched and much more to do with whether it picked a clear position, whether it built delivery and customer service that hold up under real volume, and whether it gave customers an actual reason to choose it over a marketplace default.
The honest answer
It is not too late to enter Brazil’s pet e-commerce market. It is too late to enter it carelessly and expect the sector’s own growth to carry a weak strategy the way it might have a few years ago. The opportunity is still real for a business that picks a specific angle, whether that is a category, a customer segment or a service model, and executes it with the same discipline the market itself has matured into.
Hugo Galvao built Enjoy Pets around exactly that kind of focus rather than trying to compete on scale from day one, which is part of why the timing question matters less than most newcomers assume. More on that approach is available at www.enjoypets.com.br.
