I keep a battered copy of a Drs. Foster and Smith catalog from, I want to say, 1994 or thereabouts on the bookshelf above my desk. The cover is a cocker spaniel in a bandanna, the binding is starting to go, and inside there are little hand-written corrections in red pen from a friend at their printer in Wisconsin who used to send me proofs because he knew I collected the things. I bring that up because the company you remember, the one started by three young veterinarians in Rhinelander in 1983, is gone. The brand name is not. There is a difference, and if you spent any time leafing through their catalogs in the 1990s and 2000s, the difference matters.
The short version: the catalog closed in 2019
Drs. Foster and Smith, the standalone mail-order pet supply company that for thirty-six years operated out of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, shut down in February 2019. About 289 employees were let go, the warehouse was emptied, and the website, drsfostersmith.com, was redirected to Petco.com. If you go there today, you will land on a Petco welcome page with a polite note explaining that the brand is now part of the Petco family. That is the truth of it, plainly told.
How we got there is a more interesting story, and the one I think long-time customers want to hear.
How three veterinarians built a real catalog
The company was founded by Dr. Race Foster, Dr. Rory Foster, and Dr. Martin Smith. Two brothers and a partner, all DVMs, working out of a small clinic in Rhinelander, started selling vitamins and supplements through the mail in 1983 because their walk-in clients kept asking where they could buy the same products they used in the practice. That is the most honest reason a mail-order business has ever been started, and in my experience the ones that begin that way have a particular character that the consultants and brand strategists can never reproduce.
By the late 1980s they had a real catalog. By the mid 1990s they were what we used to call a category killer in the pet space, and drsfostersmith.com went up in 1998, which sounds late now but was early then. They sold their own private-label foods, prescription medications through a licensed pharmacy, aquarium gear that the freshwater hobbyists swore by, dog beds you could actually wash without losing the shape, and that small steady stream of educational articles signed by one of the doctors. Customers trusted them because the trust was earned, page by page, season after season. That is what a good catalog does. It earns its place on the kitchen counter.
The Petco acquisition in 2015
In November 2014, Petco announced it had agreed to acquire Drs. Foster and Smith, and the deal closed in early 2015. Terms were not disclosed publicly, but the trade press put the business at roughly 250 million dollars in annual revenue, which was a serious number for a privately held catalog operation in Rhinelander. Petco said all the right things about preserving the brand and the veterinary heritage, and for a few years it more or less did. The runway, as it turned out, was about four years.
Why Petco closed it
In late January 2019, Petco emailed customers and announced the closure of the Rhinelander operation. By February 12, the warehouse, the call center, the pharmacy, and the website were done, with the exception of the live aquaria business, which Petco kept running for a while longer. The honest reason was Chewy and Amazon. The independent online pet category had collapsed into two giants, and a mid-sized catalog operation, no matter how well run, could not match their shipping speed or their pricing on commodity bags of kibble. Maintaining a separate catalog, a separate fulfillment center, a separate pharmacy license, and a separate brand calendar in Wisconsin while running 1,400-plus retail stores under another name was simply more overhead than the math justified. So they consolidated. The Rhinelander jobs went with it.
Is there still a Drs. Foster and Smith catalog?
No. There is no printed Drs. Foster and Smith catalog mailed to your house anymore, and there has not been one since 2019. If you receive something today claiming to be from Drs. Foster and Smith, it is almost certainly a Petco mailing using the brand name on a few private-label products, most often aquatic supplies. The independent catalog operation, the one with the Foster and Smith bylines and the Rhinelander return address and the staff veterinarian Q-and-A column on the inside back cover, is finished.
What the brand looks like in 2026
Walk through the Petco website today and you will still find Drs. Foster and Smith on the label of certain products, particularly in the aquarium and pond categories. Their koi and goldfish foods are still well regarded by hobbyists, the supplements line carries on, and a handful of dog and cat staples still bear the name. It is, in plain terms, a Petco house brand now. A respected one, with real heritage on the label, but a house brand. The veterinarians who built it are no longer involved.
If you are shopping for the products themselves, you can still get many of them. If you are shopping for the experience of the catalog, the editorial voice, the relationship with a vet-owned mail-order company, that part is gone. I am not going to dress that up.
Where to look now if you miss the experience
Several catalog and online operations still serve the corner of the pet market that Drs. Foster and Smith owned. None of them are a one-for-one replacement, and I would distrust anyone who told you they were, but each does some piece of it well.
- Petco is the natural starting point because that is where the surviving Drs. Foster and Smith product line actually lives. If you want the koi food or the supplements with the original branding, that is where they are stocked.
- Chewy is the closest thing to a successor on the catalog side. They print real catalogs, they have a working customer-service operation, their pharmacy is licensed in all fifty states, and they will autoship the heavy bags so you do not have to wrestle them in from the car. They are not vet-owned, and the editorial voice is lighter, but the operation runs.
- Orvis still publishes its dog catalog and still treats sporting dogs and the people who love them as serious customers. Their dog beds are durable, expensive, and worth it if your animal is hard on equipment.
- In the Company of Dogs remains a specialty book for dog people in particular, with a curated assortment that has more personality than most.
- Pet Supplies 4 Less and Pet Supermarket cover the value end of the category if price is the first concern.
You can browse all of these and more through the pet section here at Catalogs.com, and request the print versions where they still publish them.
A practical note for longtime customers
If you still have a stack of old Drs. Foster and Smith catalogs in a drawer somewhere, hold on to them. Old catalogs are genuinely useful: the product photography is sharper than the descriptions on most websites, and the educational articles on canine geriatric care are still as clear as anything I have read since. The brand may belong to Petco now, but the work those three veterinarians put on the page over thirty-six years belongs to the people who saved it.
And if you are looking for a new catalog to keep on the kitchen counter, take your time. The good ones still exist. They just have different names on the cover.
