Summer 2010

Thanks for coming to our Open House!

 

We would like to thank everyone who participated in our Open House on the Queen Mary for making it our most successful event ever!

The enthusiasm of our manufacturers and customers in embracing the sports theme made this a great experience for everyone.

We input all show orders by Friday of the show week and will be shipping most orders by the end of July, according to your requested delivery dates.

Door Prize Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the major UPP door prizes:

• Paws of Redlands won 4 Tickets to Disneyland
• Healthy Pet Pantry of El Cajon won the Wii Sports game
• Pet Supply of Trabuco Canyon won the iPod Touch

Many of our suppliers also had raffles for some great prizes. A complete list of winners will be posted on our website as soon as it becomes available.

Awards for Best Booths

A select group of retailers voted on the best supplier booths, and the trophy winners were (drum roll please):

• Most Creative — Petropics, maker of Tiki Cat and Tiki Dog
• Most Fun — Bayer, with its basketball toss game
• Best Use of the Sports Theme — Midwestern Pet Foods, with its Fast Pitch game
• Best Overall Booth — Eukanuba, which featured Hall of Fame baseball player Brooks Robinson

Special Events

Many thanks to the suppliers who sponsored special events for our Open House:

• Merrick, who sponsored Tuesday's "Tailgate Dinner"
• Eukanuba, who sponsored the "Eukanuba Pure Excitement Casino Party"
• Nutro, who provided Wednesday's "Breakfast of Champions"

Tools for Success

The purpose of our Open house is not just to sell products, but also to provide our customers with opportunities to grow their sales, share ideas, and become more successful. For example:

• World Pet Association and My Own Business, Inc. continued to showcase their pet store training and business training programs.
• Nutro continues to offer on-site customer service training seminars for retailers.
• This year, Merrick introduced a simple new tool to help retailers track their sales, customer counts, and average ticket sales that you can use to grow your business. It's in the form of a calendar that also includes some interesting facts about how customers behave. If you didn't get one, contact your Merrick or UPP field sales rep.

Want to bring new customers into your store?

Each new customer is worth $770, according to the August 2009 edition of Pet Age Magazine.

You are much further ahead when you convert a customer from grocery, Petco, or Petsmart to your store, than when an existing customer changes what they buy from you.

Talk to your UPP rep about how you can use our exclusive UPP co-op advertising program to bring in new customers. We've reached over 5 million households since we started this program. We are continuously learning from our experience and fine-tuning the program so that these ads are becoming more and more effective.

Remember — each new customer is worth $770. Let's work together to get them into YOUR store.

SuperZoo is Coming!

We are looking forward to seeing you at SuperZoo, September 14-16, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

Come back often to our website here at www.uppet.com for more information about our products, prices and programs.