Taobao/Tmall turned a pet trade show into a story about giving up half your bed

At the 28th Asia Pet Fair, one of the region's biggest pet industry trade shows, Taobao and Tmall's pet division didn't just set up a booth. They built an argument: your pet already owns half your life, and the market should catch up.

The theme was "我的世界，有你一半" — roughly "My world, with half of it yours" — packaged in English as "Party You and Me." The pitch is deliberately domestic. The sofa, you share. The bed, you share. Even your heart, the copy goes, gets a whole chunk carved out for the animal sleeping on it. It's pet-as-family positioning, executed not as an ad slogan but as a physical space.

The mechanics are where it gets interesting for anyone watching China's pet economy. Taobao/Tmall pet pulled together 18 pet brands — including NetEase Yanxuan, Frontline (福来恩), Wanpy (顽皮), Advocate (大宠爱), and LANBO (蓝氏) — and organized the floor around seven "advanced" trends in pet care, each with its own themed zone mapped to a slice of shared daily life. Rather than each brand renting its own booth, the platform bundled them into one co-branded ecosystem story.

Celebrity pull was on-brand for a Taobao live-commerce play: top livestreamer Li Jiaqi walked the floor and opened a dedicated streaming session, while actress Huo Siyan appeared as an "Ambassador of Pet Trends."

The quieter signal was who else showed up. Alongside pet brands stood a cross-category "crossover street" of names that don't make pet food: adidas, PANDORA, heritage Chinese jeweler Laofengxiang (老凤祥), Kiehl's, and DHC. The message is that pet ownership is now a lifestyle layer broad enough for a running-shoe brand or a jewelry house to want in — a sign of how far beyond food and litter the "pet as family" economy has expanded.

Outside the expo, the platform also partnered with animal-welfare group Ta Foundation (它基金) on an anti-abandonment pledge — "refuse to abandon, be responsible to the end," with a blunt line about not letting trash piles become pets' homes. It's the emotional counterweight to the feel-good "half your world" framing, grounding the campaign in something harder than merch.

What Taobao/Tmall is doing here is a familiar platform move with a pet-economy twist: turning a trade show into a positioning statement, bundling dozens of brands under one narrative, and using the scale of a platform to push "pets are family" from a marketing consensus toward an actual industry standard. The couch may be half theirs, but the Expo real estate, this year, was fully Taobao's.