From sweeping floors to €40 million

When Anthony Gallagher opened the first Petstop store in Sandyford, Dublin, in May 1995, he had no intention of staying in the pet trade for three decades. ‘My plan was to get in, get big fast and get out,’ he says. Large-format pet stores didn't yet exist in Ireland, and Gallagher — who had cut his retail teeth sweeping floors for Penneys before rising through its management ranks — spotted a gap that mirrored the chains already expanding in the UK and US.

The model nearly worked exactly as planned, until it didn't.

By the late 1990s, Petstop had grown to five stores and reached break-even. Then came the dot-com boom. Gallagher launched petmad.com, snapping up keywords across Europe, and within months Petco-backed Petopia.com offered roughly $42 million to use Petstop as a launchpad into the European market. The deal was all but done — until the bubble burst overnight in April 2000. ‘We had €5 million invested in PetMad, and we were left with no chair when the music stopped,’ Gallagher recalls.

The fallout was brutal. Petstop owed creditors around €5 million, was bleeding cash, and Gallagher personally negotiated down the debt, paying back what he could over several years rather than declaring bankruptcy and dragging smaller suppliers down with him. ‘I went to all the creditors and said, look, I'm going to give you 50% of your money now, and if you bear with me, over the next three years I'm going to pay you back all your money.’ At one particularly low point, he used his son's communion money to cover staff wages.

The company sold a lease to Carpet Right for €1.2 million just to stay afloat, and consolidated down to a single store. That last shop, in West End Retail Park in Blanchardstown, became the foundation for the rebuild — helped along, fittingly, by retail's oldest rule. ‘Lidl opened next door to us. The next day, our sales went up by 35% immediately,’ Gallagher says. When Aldi followed six months later, sales doubled again. ‘It's people, it's location. And it's doing the simple things right.’

Petstop's main competitor today is MaxiZoo, a chain turning over roughly $4 bn a year across 2,900 European stores. Petstop, by contrast, runs 15 stores and still out-trades its multinational rival on a per-store basis. ‘We're probably doing over twice the turnover per…