- March 13, 2026
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After seven years of making tails wag across Sarasota and Manatee counties, local pet retail chain DOGPerfect is expanding its reach.
The company, with $5.4 million in revenue in 2025, recently opened its fifth location and, thinking even bigger, took the next step, to officially begin franchising.
DOGPerfect owners Linda and Rob Emery say when they had three stores a couple of years ago, they were faced with a decision — whether to continue growing and how.
“Having three locations," Rob writes in a recent LinkedIn post announcing the decision to franchise, "was a very odd size — too small to justify an admin layer and really gain economy of scale in our purchasing, but too large to ignore the prospect that our locations were performing really well and could ultimately be worth a decent amount with the correct structure,”
At first, the couple thought about selling their stores to a company that could scale the business. Or they considered turning the stores over to an existing franchise.
“We just couldn’t find a good fit,” Rob says. “What we've built at DOGPerfect is, honestly, it was a little better. It felt like there would be a tough move backwards for our customer.”
So they decided to set up a franchise themselves.
Franchising is not unfamiliar to Rob, who in 1993 started Cellular & More in Michigan, which he says became one of Verizon’s top-performing independent wireless retail chains. He launched a dozen or so locations before bringing them into a Midwest franchise group.
Next, he co-founded ProtectCell, a cellphone insurance company, which grew to more than $90 million in revenue before he sold it to a public company in 2014. After that, he says, he began investing in other companies, including SnugglePuppy, which sells toys featuring a heartbeat that comforts pets. That got him into the pet industry.
In 2019, he helped open the first DOGPerfect store in Lakewood Ranch. The company’s business model is twofold: There is the retail side selling products from dog food to toys and a service component that includes professional as well self-service grooming.
Over the years, the company has added stores in the two-county area. The roster includes the UTC district in east Manatee County; the Landings off US 41 in Sarasota; Southside Village, just south of downtown Sarasota; and its newest location in Parrish, in a plaza on Moccasin Wallow Road. DOGPerfect shops are in affluent neighborhoods where people have active lifestyles, Linda says.
The average store posts about $1.84 million in annual revenue, and the Emerys project to surpass $6 million in revenue this year and reach $10 million by the end of 2027.
Based on the performance of the existing locations, “We thought we had a great opportunity,” Rob says, “and we decided to grow.”
Franchising seemed a natural step, too.
“A lot of people have always felt that our stores were national franchises just because of the way they look and feel,” Rob says, noting the company has enlisted the help of a designer to lay out each location. “Lots of our customers have always asked, ‘Do you have any of these in this market or that market?’”
To get started, a neighbor connected the Emerys with a franchise attorney, and they underwent an eight-month process that culminated in filing documents launching the DOGPerfect franchise Feb. 26. The 250-page DOGPerfect franchise disclosure document is now an operating manual that functions as a playbook for how to start a DOGPerfect store.
The initial investment required to launch a store is $320,000 to $950,000.
Initially, the Emerys plan to start franchising in the Southeast to leverage supplier and distributor relationships. Staying in that region would also enable them to visit locations easily.
That said, Rob adds: “Sometimes you have to go where the customer leads you.”
The couple has a software system that defines territories where the demographics support putting a DOGPerfect store, which ranges from 2,500 to 4,000 square feet.
As far as potential franchisees, the ideal would be someone community-oriented, retail-minded, hands-on, willing to learn and with “an unbelievable love for dogs and pets,” says Rob, who along with Linda, is a pet parent to three dogs. The couple declines to disclose the total investment in launching a franchise component, only that they hope to have five to eight new locations by the end of 2027.
When the Emerys opened their newest shop in February in Parrish, they used it as a model for franchisees.
“We're basically taking that store and treating it like a franchise, as our trial run,” Rob says, adding it has served as a “template for documenting all of the processes,” like purchasing, to sell the concept to someone else.
As an example, Linda says, they wanted a newer brand of self-wash tub in Parrish than in other locations. They had to research tubs, negotiate a deal to buy them, figure out how long the order would take and arrange for plumbing to be installed before getting an idea of the timeframe for opening.
When the Parrish store opened, the couple heard 20 times its first day in business that customers were “so glad you’re here now,” Rob says. About 100 dogs came by on opening day, he adds, from a 2-pound chihuahua to a Great Dane.
Growing a brick-and-mortar chain in an e-commerce everywhere era is something of a counterintuitive move. But while online competition exists, the Emerys say their stores provide services and expertise the internet cannot. Many people bring their dogs in for nail trims, for one.
On the retail side, “It's challenging to buy frozen food online, so we focus a lot on that,” Rob says, adding that it is the “best nutrition you can get for your dog.”
Staff members can also help find solutions for specific conditions like dogs with itchy skin, Linda says. Stores have about seven to 10 employees, including full- and part-time staffers, from groomers to store associates.
The DOGPerfect business model is “probably about 75% retail and 25% services, which ironically is pretty much the opposite of other franchises we will be competing against,” Rob says. “Training people [on products] is what leads us to that result. It allows us to have higher revenue on the product side because of that nutritional knowledge.”
U.S. pet spending is projected to reach nearly $200 billion by 2030, according to a report from Capital One, which also estimates pet food spending alone in 2025 totaled around $67.8 billion.
Building the retail side against the looming threat of e-commerce has also brought the Emerys some key lessons. Over the last seven years, the couple has “learned what not to do,” Rob says.
At first, DOGPerfect offered dog training, which he says took up a lot of space the business could be using instead to sell other products. Ultimately, the training “didn’t bear fruit,” he says, so they stopped offering it.
The stores also went through redesigns to put frozen food front and center so that it is “in the customer's mind as soon as they walk in the door,” he adds.
DOGPerfect went from selling “too many boutique brands” of dog food at first to narrowing the selection upon finding there was “no market penetration or customer knowledge,” Rob says; as a result, staff members had to spend a long time explaining every brand.
“We have to have some brands that customers recognize,” he says.
Coming up with the right product mix is an ongoing process, the Emerys say, as there are always new items coming out, from chew toys to other products “you would want to introduce to your dog,” Rob says. “We definitely use the mantra that we wouldn't bring stuff into the store that we wouldn't give to our own dogs.”
The couple’s dogs come to the “office” and try out toys, Linda adds.
“So much of our life revolves around those dogs,” Rob says of their two golden retrievers and black Labrador retriever. “Those guys are everything.”
