"Ideal Home for Humans and Pets" is reshaping the user model of the home furnishing industry.
Pet-friendly home furniture has become a high-premium incremental segment amid the stock competition of the custom home furnishing industry. While the gross profit margin of full-home packages has been squeezed down to single digits, pet owners are willing to pay over 20% extra for "invisible integration" and "space efficiency". This is not a matter of adding a cat cabinet SKU, but a complete rewrite of the user model for full-home customization. The cabinet structure, panel standards, hardware selection and delivery chain all need to be reconstructed, and the first party to set the standards will build up its competitive moat.
Innovation of User Model Amid the Stock Market Dilemma
According to iResearch's *White Paper on Development Trends of China's Pet Home Furnishing Industry 2026*, the online share of pet home furnishing stands at 15.9%, up 9.1% year on year, firmly ranking as the second largest category of online pet consumption. 22.6% of pet owners increased their spending on pet home furnishing in the past year. What drives custom home furnishing enterprises, home appliance makers and automobile manufacturers to enter this sector collectively is not just the simple emotional dividend, but the more intense pressure from the underlying market conditions. After the full-home customization packages are priced at the 19999-yuan range, the gross profit margin has been squeezed to single digits, and no premium anchor point can be found in the traditional stock market. Pet home furnishing comes with inherent emotional premium and highly overlapping customer groups: middle-class residents in first- and second-tier cities, families living in rental properties or small-sized apartments, with decision-making power mostly held by women. The white paper divides these consumers into three categories: practical function advocates, smart technology enthusiasts, and emotional integration pursuers, who are exactly the group of customers that full-home customization providers have long wanted to secure but cannot stably retain.
However, the deeper issue is not the new customer group, but the changing user model. When a cat is added to the family members, the moving lines on the house type drawing, cabinet structure and panel parameters all need to be recalculated. More than 60% of users require invisible integration, and nearly 40% are willing to pay over 20% extra for higher space efficiency.
On the product side, leading enterprises are exploring in four paths. Milana under Sofia has launched the Pet-Friendly Series, embedding pet-related demands into the very beginning of full-home design. KUKA has started with the pain points of soft furnishings as early as 2024, launching the Human-Pet Cozy House to address the challenges of pet raising with scratch-resistant fabrics and exclusive storage spaces. OLO Home adheres to the light high-end customization aesthetic route, embedding the cat ergonomic module into the mid-century high-end customization aesthetic with the Stockholm PRO Series, making human-pet cohabitation a design language that can generate premium. OPPEIN cuts into the pet space sector with modular embedded cabinets.
On the channel side, Easyhome has opened a self-operated offline human-pet home scenario of about 600 square meters at North 4th Ring Road in Beijing, integrating scattered product solutions into an experiential terminal.
The four product paths plus one channel path lead to the same goal: leading enterprises are gradually realizing that pet-friendly home furnishing is not just about making one more cat cabinet, but reconstructing a complete system.
System Reconstruction: Threefold Changes in Materials, Manufacturing and Delivery
System reconstruction takes place at three levels.
The first level: materials and standards. The white paper shows that the public voice volume of pet raising in small-sized apartments increases by 163.7% year on year, and "safety and environmental protection" ranks first with a proportion of 30.6%. Scratch-resistant and wear-resistant fabrics, ENF-grade panels, and easily detachable and washable structures are evolving from bonus items to the access threshold for the pet home furnishing line.
However, segmented standards are still absent. At the general level, the first national safety standard for pet supplies GB/T 43839-2024 was implemented in October 2024; while segmented unified specifications in the custom home furnishing field for the wear resistance times of scratch-resistant fabrics, the safety of panels bitten by pets, the durability of easily detachable and washable structures and other details are still blank. This means that the basic safety threshold for pet supplies has been legalized, but the segmented field of custom home furnishing is still operating without unified rules — which is exactly the window of opportunity for pioneers. The first party to set the standards will gain first-mover advantages.
The inflection point has arrived. In March 2026, the Secretariat of ISO/TC 355 was officially announced to settle in Suzhou, China, and will be undertaken by Goodbaby. At the Global Pet Supplies Conference in Shenzhen in July, the organizer further clarified that the domestic industry has taken the initiative in international standard formulation for the first time, and Shenzhen has synchronously supported three public service platforms covering standards, access and patents. Behind these institutions and platforms is a more straightforward signal: in the past decade, Chinese pet enterprises could only follow the standards set by Europe and the United States; now, the rule-making right returns to domestic enterprises for the first time. The first party to upgrade its enterprise standard to the industry standard will hold the chip of pricing power. The balance of cross-category standard discourse power is tilting towards domestic participants, and the window for taking the lead in setting standards is officially opened.
The second level: manufacturing end. Apart from standards, the response speed of the manufacturing end also determines who can take the lead in running through the business model. More than 500 supply chain factories made their collective appearance at the Shenzhen Pet Fair in March, marking that the pet home furnishing supply chain is evolving from mass standardization to C2M small-batch fast response. Different pet breeds have huge differences in body shape and behavior, so parametric design plus flexible production lines is the core competitive moat.
In the direction of pet digitalization, Lingwei Era under Dreame has launched the virtual pet 1.0 "ShadowPal" at 2026 AWE, trying to build the digital identity of pets with intelligent hardware plus cloud AI twin. The industrial preparation on the supply chain side is progressing faster than the standard formulation on the brand side. The user model has rewritten not only the space parameters, but also the digital identity of pets. The superposition of space system and data system forms a twofold reconstruction.
The third level: channel and delivery. The third layer of system reconstruction falls on the channel side. The 600-square-meter self-operated "Human-Pet Home" test project of Easyhome is verifying whether dealers can upgrade from selling cabinets to providing pet space planning services. On platforms such as Black Cat Complaint, customer complaints about pet home furnishing including breakage, instability and mismatched size occur frequently, which are usually caused by the disconnection between solutions and delivery. It is easy to buy a cat cabinet online, but embedding it into the full-home customization system requires professional planning such as load-bearing calculation, ventilation design and waterproof closing, while the existing dealer training system has not covered these modules yet.
Three Realistic Defects
When cats have independent moving lines on the house type drawing, the concept of "full-home customization" has been rewritten. It is not about making one more cabinet, but reconstructing a complete system. The absence of standards is not only the compliance cost, but also the competitive moat for pioneers.
However, it must be recognized that the pet home furnishing sector is still "small but beautiful". The total market size of the pet industry reaches 3.126 trillion yuan, and the absolute volume allocated to the home furnishing industry is far from being able to support the main revenue axis of leading custom home furnishing enterprises. In the next two or three years, it is more likely to be a high-premium, low-proportion supplementary line, rather than a substitute for the main track.
Three realistic defects:
First, the disconnection between solutions and delivery. The traditional measurement-design-production-installation chain needs to be reconsidered when facing pet-related scenarios. The load-bearing calculation of cat passages, the wear-resistant edge finishing of pet zones, and the design of odor exhaust ducts are still emerging fields in the existing training system. According to feedback from multiple industry dealers, the conversion rate of design and order placement for pet modules is less than one third of that of traditional cabinets, and the bottleneck lies precisely in the "measurement-design" link — designers cannot calculate the live load of cat passages, nor can they promise the compliant size of ventilation ducts.
Second, the double-edged effect of standard absence. The lack of unified specifications means blurred after-sales responsibilities: it is hard to define whether the damage of cabinet doors scratched by pets is a product quality problem or a usage problem. The self-claimed "pet-grade panels" have no third-party certification, and cannot support large-scale development. According to industry research, most of the so-called "pet-grade panels" on the current market are just ENF-grade panels with new labels, whose price is increased by 30% while no independent test report for wear resistance and scratch resistance parameters is available. For the same type of scratch-resistant fabric, the marked wear resistance times vary from 5000 to 20000 among different brands, leaving no way for consumers to make comparison.
Third, product homogenization bubble. Social media monitoring shows that the public voice volume of emotional and high-appearance pet products increases by 150% year on year, and "dopamine cat nests" became viral quickly but also faded out rapidly. When pet raising groups enter the rational repurchase period from the stage of "spending money for love", the repurchase rate of single products driven only by appearance will be significantly lower than that of functional products. Taking "dopamine cat nests" as an example, the number of related posts on social platforms has soared to 120,000 within half a year, but the return rate of similar products on e-commerce platforms is as high as 35%, far higher than the average 18% level of the pet home furnishing category. Products with high appearance can gain popularity quickly, but functional defects will lead to negative reviews and low repurchase rate of less than 5%. This means that high-appearance single products rise and fall rapidly, and only functional products can retain users after the arrival of the rational repurchase period.
However, the industrial trend will not stagnate due to the bubble, and the window period for user model rewriting has been opened.
The Window Period Is Being Fulfilled at an Accelerated Pace
Home appliance manufacturers are developing shared washing products for humans and pets, automobile manufacturers are designing car cabins with pet mode, and industrial design platforms are collecting concept drafts of shared home furniture for humans and pets. If traditional custom home furnishing enterprises still equate the pet product line with adding a cat cabinet SKU, the window period for user model rewriting will be quickly occupied by cross-category competitors.
The shift from "full-home customization for human residents" to "full-home customization designed for the whole family" is the rewriting of user boundaries. For practitioners in the custom home furnishing industry, "whether to launch a pet product line" has become a must-answer question in next year's product planning meeting; for dealers, pet space planning is no longer an optional course; for supply chain factories, scratch resistance, easy disassembly and flexible manufacturing are not "optional", but "mandatory".
The window of opportunity has just opened, and may close at any time.