Pethome

Pethome is an upscale pet hotel for cats, dogs, and other animals, built on the belief that leaving your pet behind shouldn't feel like an act of guilt. Backed by Petshop Group, one of the leading pet retail companies in the CIS countries, Pethome launched as a fully formed brand from day one: naming, brand strategy, visual identity, spatial navigation, and social media—all developed under one creative direction.

Pet owners don't skip vacations because they can't afford them. They skip vacations because they can't stop worrying about their pets. That insight gathered directly from conversations with real pet parents became the entire foundation of the brand.

The emotional weight of separation is real. For the pet. And even more so for the owner. The challenge was to build a brand that could genuinely dissolve that anxiety not by ignoring it, but by meeting it with warmth, quiet confidence, and a carefully placed sense of humor.

At the same time, this wasn't a budget boarding service. Pethome partnered with Paum, a renowned interior architecture studio, to create a space that felt genuinely considered and calm. The branding had to match that standard and then go a little further.

The name Pethome was built from the inside out. "Pet" anchored it within the Petshop Group brand architecture, while "home" delivered the emotional promise directly: your pet isn't being left somewhere. They're going somewhere better.

The logotype made this tangible: a pet's head nestled inside the shape of a home, so the idea was readable in a single glance, without a word of explanation.

Rather than illustrations, we brought in large-format portrait photography of cats and dogs dignified, expressive, almost human in their gaze. These weren't cute pet pictures. They were characters. And they gave the brand its emotional core.

A custom icon system, what we called pet emotions, extended the identity into every detail: happy, curious, a little dramatic, peacefully sleepy. Each icon captured something any pet owner would recognize instantly, and together they gave the brand a visual language that was playful without ever feeling childish.

Let’s go back to the insight about "affordable vacation". For owners, as for their pets, the process of separation, even for a short period of time, is a huge stress. What is stress? Stress is the body's reaction to any change that requires an adjustment or response. How is stress manifested? Through emotions. Our metaphor for visual brand identification is emotions. Pet’s emotions. They are not diverse as human’s emotions but we can easily notice if a cat or a dog feels loneliness or is exсited.

Color was a deliberate and strategic choice. Soft pastel tones were selected not for aesthetic trend, but for psychological effect to lower the emotional temperature before a single word is read. No clinical whites. No urgent reds. Just calm.

Pethome launched as the kind of place people talked about, not just among pet owners, but among anyone who appreciated a brand built with genuine intention. The combination of considered interior design and a cohesive, emotionally intelligent identity created something the market hadn't seen before in this category: a pet hotel that felt trustworthy, warm, and worth the price from the very first impression.
The project established a complete and scalable brand system, ready to grow with the business across new locations and services.

Sonya Mudvex | art director & brand designer
Mark Kholodaev | graphic designer
Ekaterina Ermolinskaya | junior graphic designer