FMK Stories · The industry

Paws, Barks & Waggin' Tails

How 131,000 American pet businesses got their names: the motifs, the puns, and the states that lean hardest on each one.

The most-used motifs in American pet care

Overview

6,600
names containing "Paw": 4,733
contain "Spa": 2,308
contain "Tail": 136,268
businesses searched

One name in twenty has a paw in it

Paw is the runaway winner: 6,600 businesses — 4.84% of the entire American pet-care industry — put it in their name. If you have ever felt that every groomer in your town is called something Paws, you were reading the data correctly.

What is striking below the top spot is how the list splits into two traditions. One is the pun — Waggin’, Woof, Pooch, Mutt, Fetch — cheerful, informal, and overwhelmingly the language of groomers and daycares. The other borrows straight from hospitality: Spa, Resort, Suites, Retreat. Those businesses are selling the same overnight stay as the kennel down the road, in the vocabulary of a hotel.

It is worth knowing that the hospitality vocabulary is purely a vocabulary. We checked whether the kennels using it charge more, and they do not.

The full leaderboard

#	Motif	Businesses	Share of all names
1	Paw	6,600	4.84%
2	Spa	4,733	3.47%
3	Tail	2,308	1.69%
4	Resort	2,265	1.66%
5	Bark	2,230	1.64%
6	Pup	2,113	1.55%
7	Canine	1,589	1.17%
8	K9	1,490	1.09%
9	Wag	1,340	0.98%
10	Fur	1,313	0.96%
11	Pooch	1,242	0.91%
12	Hound	760	0.56%
13	Woof	719	0.53%
14	Mutt	610	0.45%
15	Paradise	380	0.28%
16	Best friend	376	0.28%
17	Purr	328	0.24%
18	Whisker	239	0.18%
19	Fetch	191	0.14%
20	Bone	167	0.12%

Where each pun lives

Raw counts would just rediscover that California is large, so this ranks states by lift: how much more often a motif appears there than in the country as a whole. A lift of 2.0 means the motif is twice as common in that state’s pet businesses as it is nationally. Only motifs with at least 10 businesses in a state are eligible.

Motif	Leans hardest in	Local share	vs national
Pooch	Rhode Island	2.7%	2.97×
Woof	Florida	1.38%	2.61×
K9	New Hampshire	2.72%	2.49×
Canine	Vermont	2.78%	2.39×
Fetch	Wisconsin	0.32%	2.31×
Hound	Idaho	1.28%	2.3×
Mutt	Kansas	0.92%	2.06×
Wag	South Dakota	1.98%	2.02×
Tail	Delaware	3.32%	1.96×
Fur	Utah	1.89%	1.96×

The caveats

The motif list is fixed, not discovered.We counted a hand-chosen set of motifs rather than mining the most frequent words, so this is a leaderboard of the puns we went looking for. A motif we never thought of doesn’t appear, however common it is.

Substrings are matched carefully, but not perfectly.Patterns are anchored to word boundaries where a naive match would misfire — “spa” must be its own word so that “spaniel” doesn’t count — but “bark” will still match a business on Barker Street.

One business, several motifs. Shares are each taken over all 136,268 names, so they overlap and do not total 100%.

Where these numbers come from

We searched the names of all 136,268live pet-care businesses in our directory — vets, groomers, kennels, daycares and dog washes — for each of a fixed list of motifs. A name can carry more than one (“Happy Paws Pet Spa” counts three times), so the shares below describe how common each motif is, and deliberately do not sum to 100%.

Every figure on this page is read from our own directory when the page builds, so it moves as the data does. For the same dataset treated at full length — sample bars, percentiles and methodology — see FMK Research.