Wholesale Pet Towels for Boarding Kennels: Counting the Stay, Not the Appointment

QINGDAO, China — A benchmarking survey of pet care operators in nine countries puts boarding at the top of the revenue table, ahead of daycare, training and grooming, and it finds that boarding also runs the highest capacity utilization of the four services [1]. The respondents were mostly single-site businesses that report repeat customers as the bulk of monthly revenue, and most say at least some customers buy something beyond the base booking [1]. For a buyer of wholesale pet towels for boarding kennels, the revealing part is not the ranking.

That mix has a purchasing consequence that rarely shows up in a budget line. The unit that matters is the stay. A grooming appointment lasts an hour. A boarding stay lasts several nights, ends with a bath, and generates cleaning between guests that has nothing to do with grooming at all. Every departure is a wash and a dry, and every stay brings its own small accidents that need a cloth before the next guest arrives, so a kennel's towel demand is set by check-outs rather than grooming slots. Add-ons pull more animals through the washing step than the revenue split suggests: boarding leads on revenue while grooming, the smallest line in the survey, is the most towel-intensive per hour worked [1]. Budget towels against appointments and the shortage lands in exactly the weeks when boarding is full, which is when it is most expensive.

Why kennels feel demand in lumps

The survey describes a business that is unevenly loaded. Most boarding operators report running at least half of capacity across the year on average, and at peak periods many are fully booked weeks in advance [1]. Capacity that sits half empty in one month and sells out in another does not consume consumables at an average rate.

Ordering against the annual average understocks the peak. Ordering against the peak ties up cash and storage in the quiet months. The compromise most operators reach is a base order plus a reorder trigger, and that only works when the reorder lead time is shorter than the booking window. A product with a long lead time forces a larger first order, which is a cash decision disguised as a purchasing decision.

The laundry question decides the format

Most of the operators in the survey run a single location [1]. That matters more than it sounds. A single site rarely has the laundry capacity of a hotel: no tunnel washer, no dedicated laundry staff, no separate soiled route. Reusable cloths in that setting mean a domestic machine running through the evening, staff hours that are not on anyone's rate card, and a hygiene argument about how a soiled towel travels from a kennel run back to a clean shelf.

Single use removes that argument and replaces it with a line item that can be counted per stay. It also settles the cross-contamination question that a boarding facility faces every day, since the same cloth that dries one animal should not be the cloth that wipes a run before the next one arrives.

Where the cost pressure comes from

Price data across major markets is unusually calm at the category level. Pet product prices were flat month over month in the European Union and the United States, fell in Brazil and rose in Canada, while energy costs continued to push at manufactured goods and left manufacturers with limited room to pass increases through [2].

Flat shelf prices with rising input costs is the combination that sends operators looking for the line they can actually measure. A towel counted per stay is measurable. A towel bought by the case and stored in a back room is not, and it is usually the line that quietly grows.

What goes on the purchase order

Three lines do most of the work: towels per stay, one format that covers both drying and cleanup, and a delivery split that puts stock in the building before the peak rather than during it. A kennel that runs two formats for the same job will use the cheaper one for the wrong task and the more expensive one for the floor.

For wholesale pet towels for boarding kennels, the order size then follows the specification. The minimum is 40,000 pieces per SKU, so the number of SKUs is the decision that governs everything else: one format in one size buys depth, three formats buy a larger commitment than most single-site operators need.

What Jaroll can do

Jaroll makes pet grooming towels for operators who have already decided how many towels a stay consumes. The specification conversation is short: a 40 × 80 cm towel at 40–130 g/m² covers drying a small animal and wiping a run, and a larger format at 60–80 × 100–160 cm is available where a bath-size towel is what the staff actually reach for.

The minimum is 40,000 pieces per SKU, the lead time is usually about 20 working days from deposit and artwork approval, and capacity runs to approximately 50 million towels per month. For a boarding business that means a first order sized to the peak weeks, followed by reorders against the same specification rather than a fresh evaluation each season.

Three questions are worth asking before that first order. Ask for a sample and dry a wet animal with it, because absorbency quoted on a data sheet and absorbency after one pass across a wet coat are different products. Ask how the pack is labeled, so the towel that leaves the kennel with a guest is not the towel that cleans the run. And ask what the reorder lead time actually is against the booking calendar, since a boarding kennel's peak is not negotiable. Jaroll answers all three in writing before a quote is issued, which is the point at which a towel stops being a commodity.

Sources

1. GlobalPETS, 2026-11-03. Survey: Pet boarding drives revenue for global pet care operators. https://globalpetindustry.com/news/survey-pet-boarding-drives-revenue-for-global-pet-care-operators/
2. GlobalPETS, 2026-10-30. Inflation snapshot: Pet product inflation cools in most major economies. https://globalpetindustry.com/news/inflation-snapshot-pet-product-inflation-cools-in-most-major-economies/