A zoo carries a retail problem a theme park does not, and it has little to do with the product itself. Everything on the shelf is read against the interpretation the visitor has just walked through. The shop sits twenty metres from the conservation display and has to agree with it.
Most of the damage comes from three things: a plush of an animal the collection does not hold, a keyring sealed in a polybag beside a display about ocean plastic, and a generic wildlife range that could have come from any gift shop in the country. None of it is a scandal on its own, and all of it costs a little credibility at the point in the visit where the subject has the visitor's full attention.
Matching the range to the collection
Visitors buy the animal they have just seen, which is obvious enough and still routinely lost at the ordering stage. A supplier minimum forces a choice of three species, and the shop ends up selling somebody else's animals to people who came for the ones in the enclosures.
Owning the tooling is what makes species-specific product possible at the volumes a single collection turns over. The group owns the plant. Cutting a mould for one animal is a decision made inside the business, the run is scheduled on the same line, and a single species can be quoted on that basis.
Materials, packaging and factory audits
The materials include RPET and bamboo where the product suits it, and packaging is being reduced across the range. Sedex membership and SMETA auditing sit behind the factory, covering labour standards, health and safety, environment and business ethics.
The working test for all of it is whether a retail assistant on the floor could answer a visitor's question about how the product was made without having to guess. The audit covers the same site the item was made on, so the answer given at the counter and the answer on the record are the same.
Fundraising ranges and zoo partners
We supply merchandise supporting fundraising and conservation work with the Australasian Society of Zoo Keeping. We work with zoos and aquariums across Australia, among them Taronga, Australia Zoo, Perth, Adelaide, Monarto, Sydney Zoo and the Australian Reptile Park.
Where retail is funding conservation work, saying so on the product carries further than saying it on a sign, since the visitor is holding the item at the moment they decide whether the story is real. The swing tag, the packaging and the print on the item are the places that claim can sit, and all three are specified at the same time as the product itself.