Dog Breeds Leading and Lagging in the 2024 Puppy Market: Should you persevere or pivot?

Which dog breeds are leading or lagging the puppy market in 2024? There has been a lot of change in the puppy market this year, so let’s dive in.

Here you will learn what recent puppy market trends suggest the future holds for your breed. Is it a good time for you to either pivot to a different breed, persevere with the breed you have, or maybe pause breeding altogether? I will help you decide which way to go, with useful advice on how to do so effectively.

You will discover emerging and current factors driving breed popularity changes, and what the current puppy market trends are by breed.

I’ll only be going through a few breeds, but I’ll show you:

• How to check the puppy market for your breed
• How to decide whether to pivot or persevere with your breed, and
• How to pivot or persevere successfully.

Current Puppy Market Trends By Breed

Here’s a bit of a snapshot of some representative things that are happening on the puppy market right now. This shows you from March 31, 2019, so this is the last five years, and the blue line are golden retriever puppies, the search demand for that particular search phrase. These are a number of people putting that search into Google, “golden retriever puppies”, in the USA. As you can see the demand for golden retriever puppies is about half what it used to be.  But in the same period, the puppy market demand for Cavapoo puppies has risen significantly. While there has been a general slowdown across the board, the puppy market really does depend on what breed you’re in.

Factors driving breed popularity changes

There’s a few factors driving breed popularity changes out there. One is that there’s a decrease in home ownership because of increasing prices for homes in Western countries. There’s been a real decrease in income levels because of inflation, and there is an aging population in Western countries.  An increased popularity of rescue dogs is not helping the situation for breeders either.

The Biggest Dog Owners are Families and More Families are Renting

The proportion of people in the USA who own a dog, the biggest dog ownership group actually is the age group that has children, the 30 to 50 year age group.  Yet they are the very group that is suffering from a decrease in home ownership. Many folks in that demographic are now renting because they can’t afford to own their own house anymore. So that’s definitely a factor which would decrease the demand for puppies when we know that this is the very group that tends to own the most pups.

Another important factor that’s driving breed popularity changes is that the bottom 80% of the income earners in the states are seeing a decline in their real income. The poor are getting poorer, but at the same time, the top 20% are taking a bigger piece of the pie.

So what this means for marketing puppies is that if you are mainly selling to the bottom 80% of the market, that market is getting tighter and tighter all the time, and competition will be growing for each dollar in that market as a breeder.

Another emerging factor set to drive changes in breed popularity is the law.

We’ve seen a few countries now that have been pressured by their local animal welfare groups to do something about what they call torture breeding. This is breeding any particular breed which they see as having inbuilt health issues because of their basic mechanical design. Here, I’m talking about dogs with very short legs, long pendulous ears, the brachycephalic squash faced dogs that have trouble breathing and keeping cool, and also dogs with excess skin, and also highly inbred breeds.

We’ve seen it happen in Norway, we’ve seen it happen now in Germany where the Dachshund is being targeted. “Dachshunds under threat”: this article is only from 2 months ago.

Are you “torture breeding”?

Some of the breeds that have been targeted specifically as so-called torture bred breeds are:

• the French Bulldog
• Labrador Retriever, which is a surprise to me,
• English Bulldog,
• Golden Retriever [they’re basically citing things like the incidence of cancer, the incidence of hip dysplasia and that sort of thing].
• German Shepherd,
• Pug,
• Cavalier King Charles,
• Beagle,
• Chihuahua,
• Boxer,
• Dachshund,
• Even my beloved Schnauzer that I breed [because it’s such an inbred breed].

Just keep your eye on this. It might take a while for it to unravel and affect where you are, but it is something to watch out for and definitely a trend that’s happening right now.

I did mention inbreeding as being one of the things that has been targeted. This shows the inbreeding coefficient on the right-hand side here. The top breeds that you see here are all breeds which are the most inbred popular breeds in the world.

The red line is the average for all breeds, which is for purebred breeds is 0.25.

Expect pressure on least healthy or inbred breeds and maybe consider a move to more functional dog breeds.

Because of this problem with the inbreeding, the increasing popularity of crossbreeds is likely to continue.

Climate Protection impacts on breeds

Another factor that we’re looking at is the influence of growing carbon neutral laws, which are pushing many, many countries to limit the amount of meat that’s being consumed, pushing farmers out. That’s what a lot of the protests we’ve been seeing around the world have been about: farmers having to cut down their herds of cattle.

Expect the cost of meat to go up. Expect a little bit later than that, possible rules around the amount of meat that can be consumed, especially if central bank digital currencies are brought in. In the name of protecting the climate they will have the capacity to program your money. For example if you go past buying a certain amount of meat they will be able to switch that capacity off so you can’t buy any more for that month. This is definitely in the works. It’s coming. I don’t know when, but it’s definitely coming.

There’s even been reports on media saying the best thing you can do for protecting the climate of the planet is to stop owning a dog or cat because they eat mostly meat. There might be pressures coming on there. The carbon footprint is really a function of the size of the animal. The bigger the animal, the more meat it eats, and the bigger it’s carbon footprint will be. This is pushing towards smaller breeds. Expect the climate tax on meat to push towards smaller dog breeds and also a shift to pets that don’t eat meat, for example, rabbits.

General Puppy Market Trends in Breed Popularity

In general, the 2024 puppy market for larger dog breeds has fallen the most:

So when we look – in general – at market trends in the last five years, you can see the biggest falls in popularity and market demand have been for the larger breeds.

Here blue is the German Shepherd, red is Labrador, and yellow is Rottweiler. This is all in the USA. Wow, that’s a huge drop for the German Shepherd: demand has shrunk by two-thirds. It’s down by about a half for Labradors and Rottweilers.

The 2024 puppy market for some small dog breeds is booming:

We can see the demand for Miniature Dachshund puppies has gone up massively in the same period. Toy poodles have dropped a little and Miniature Schnauzers have dropped a bit as well. But why has the interest in Mini Dachshunds risen so much? I don’t know!  Perhaps because baby boomers are retiring and happen to like them. They seem to be popular with older people.

Does that mean go rush out and breed Miniature Dachshunds? Not necessarily when we think about the “torture breeding” pressures on dogs with short legs and long backs and such, it might not be the best idea.

But it is a good idea to check your breed and have a look at some alternative breeds. If you are considering pivoting, keep in mind the breed’s physical structure [avoid extreme body features like squashed faces, short legs, excessive skin folds, pendulous ears], size and health.

How to check how the puppy market for your breed is trending

Watch the video above to see this in action:

I want to show you now how you can actually check the trend for your own breed.

Let’s go over to Google Trends. So when you go over to Google Trends, which you can find by just googling “Google Trends”, it will open up in your country. The way to get started is to just click “explore”:  you can put in your breed.

If you’re not in the right country when you go in here, you can change it. You can even go down to the level of your state. If I select, for example, United States and let it hover there before I click on it, you can actually select the state. So I might go, okay, I want to know what’s happening in Arkansas. You then can compare it to another breed within that state.

Best is to change it to past five years rather than past 12 months so you get a better picture of overall trends. And sometimes there won’t be enough search volume to get a meaningful graph. In that case you can go back to your whole country so you get a bit more data.

I haven’t done this comparison before, but just at a glance, you can see the Chihuahua is way more popular than the Bichon Frise because there’s 75 compared to 8. There’s almost 10 times more searches for Chihuahua than there is for Bichon Frise. Bichon Frise has gone down from seven down to six, so it stayed fairly steady. Chihuahua has gone down from about 74 to 67. So it stayed pretty steady too.

These numbers don’t mean anything in themselves except to recognize trends, and compare one breed to another. So Chihuahuas are more than twice as popular as Beagles. Beagles have suffered a little bit of a decline as well. [Most breeds have suffered a small decline simply because of the factors that I talked about before].

Now you’ll be able to see now how to do that comparison and market research using Google Trends to help inform any thoughts you are having about pivoting to a different breed. At least go check your own breed in your own area and see how it’s tracking so you don’t get some nasty surprises down the track.

Should You Persevere or Pivot to a New Breed?

What are you going to do? Are you going to pivot or are you going to persevere? [Hopefully you’re not going to perish].

There are a few things to consider.

Pivoting to a new breed is expensive and you can’t change things overnight. It does take a few years to wait for your breeding dogs to mature, to do whatever health checks you need to do at the right ages, make sure you’re breeding good quality, healthy dogs.

So do do your market research. Don’t just rush out on emotional reasons and get into a new breed because of what the hairdresser said last time you had your hair done.

Could you PIVOT to Crossbreeding dogs?

Do consider crossbreeding as well. If you’re a purist, apologies, but there’s definitely a demand for crossbred dogs. Designer breeds are considered healthier by the top-end of the market who’ve done their homework, who understand inbreeding and things like that. Crossbreeding is definitely a faster strategy than having to start a whole new breed if yours is tanking right now.

Definitely check your thinking before doing anything! 

For example, you might have Cavaliers or Poodles and be thinking about Cavapoos…

You can see as far as crossbreeds go, they’re made up of toy poodles with Cavaliers and it produces Cavapoos. The yellow is the Cavapoos, the red is Cavalier. Cavalier has gone from around about 28, 29 down to just below like about 18, so it’s dropped about 30%. Toy poodle in the same period has dropped about the same amount in demand, whereas the Cavapoos has actually increased in demand. So it’s come from about 28 up to about 35, I don’t know. But you can see it’s definitely gone up, right? It’s gone up.

So if you’re an existing toy poodle breeder or even a miniature poodle breeder or an existing Cavalier breeder, then you might want to consider getting into Cavapoos, at least for the interim period while you pivot.

But it doesn’t always work that way, which is why you should CHECK first!

This Google Trends chart is comparing Huskies, Pomeranian and the cross between the two, which is the Pomsky.

The demand for Huskies has dropped dramatically in the last 5 years. Look at that. That’s incredible. It’s about less than a third what it was five years ago.

Pomeranians, though, they’ve also dropped down quite a lot, more than half.

And even though Pomskys haven’t dropped as badly, they’ve still dropped too. They’re still about half what they were.

So it doesn’t necessarily go always that designer breeds are going to be better. Do the checks. I’ve shown you how, so make sure you check.

How to Pivot or Persevere and WIN in the current Puppy Market

Here’s the next thing you’ve got to do when considering whether to pivot or persevere, if you actually want to win.

While assessing the market viability of a particular breed you should:

• Work out how many people your marketing has to reach and
• Design your marketing to reach that number of people.

Here’s how to work that out:

1. Determine Your Minimum Market Reach

First thing you’ve got to work out is what I call your minimum market reach.

It’s basically the number of people that your marketing has to reach in order to sell all your puppies.

And of course, it depends on the size of the market for your breed and the number of puppies that you’re trying to sell per year. So how many people do we need to reach to sell one puppy and how many puppies are we trying to sell? When you multiply those together, we’re going to get the number of people that we have to reach in order to sell all of our puppies.

So here’s an example:

I have been doing this and mentoring breeders since 2019. When I first started, it was pre-COVID and it took reaching about 5,000 people to to sell one Labrador puppy back then. Now it’s more like 10,000 people because things have tightened up. So we’re going to go on 10,000 people. [We use Labradors as the benchmark because they are one of the most popular breeds].

To work the Minimum Market Reach for Standard Poodles.

If it takes 10,000 people to sell one Labrador puppy and we’re trying to compare it to standard poodle.

The demand is six times less for Standard Poodles as it is for Labradors. That means we need to reach six times more people to sell one standard poodle puppy as we do to sell one Labrador puppy.

Six x 10,000 = 60,000 people.

So our marketing has to reach 60,000 people in order for us to sell one puppy.

If I want to sell 40 puppies a year, that means my marketing has to reach 2.4 million people. So that’s my minimum market reach.

Our ease of reaching those people depends on:

• Where we live, as well as
• How good our marketing is.

So if you’re a standard poodle breeder and you lived in Oregon:

Oregon has a population of four million. So if you reached everybody in Oregon, you’d be able to sell all your 40 puppies, wouldn’t you? But what if you lived in Idaho or Montana? Idaho would have to be reaching out to either Oregon or supplementing itself with Montana numbers, reaching both its own state and Montana in order to sell the 40 puppies in this case study scenario.

So go ahead and figure out from where you live, who do you have to reach? If it’s too many people or you live in a place that’s too far away, then you might want to think about pivoting to a more popular breed.

2. Design Your Breeding Business to Reach Those People

There’s no point sitting under a rock when there’s all these people around you who are interested in your puppies but can’t find YOU.

So how do you design your breeding business to reach your target puppy market?

You can learn how to do that with a FREE 1 hour online Marketing for Breeders masterclass.   The class is “on demand” which means you can watch it anytime to suit you.

For one hour, I will teach you how to attract the right buyers, what they are looking for and how to communicate with them in a way that they understand that you are the breeder that they’ve been looking for. This one hour class is on demand. So you can go in there and watch it within 10 minutes from now, or you can put it off to a time that’s more suitable to you. And at the end, if you want to, I’ll talk to you afterwards personally and help you with your breeding business – again for free – for a whole hour of my time.  [With NO hard-sell, I promise! ]

So I look forward to seeing you on the master class and maybe talking with some of you there.  Good luck with your puppies and your breeding.

I’m Dr. Meg Howe,  a business coach for dog breeders.  My Facebook page is Marketing for Breeders, and my program is the Elite Breeder Formula.