Central Live, a new program from Central Garden & Pet, is an interesting initiative that brings reputable livestock vendors a little bit closer to the dry-goods fold. Within the month, aquarium stores who are customers of Central Pet will begin to be able to talk to their sales representative to facilitate ordering and purchasing from two of the country’s largest aquatic livestock dealers.
Sea Dwelling Creatures will cover the saltwater corals, fish and invertebrates while Southland Aquatics will be providing the freshwater fish and live plants for Central Pet’s Central Live program. New and existing customers will be able to order from both Sea Dwelling and Southland whenever they wish, particularly early in the week when the getting is good, but now the Central Pet rep will act as a sort of rep for the livestock dealers as well.
The new Central Live and Central Pet rep will be able to help novice LFS owners in placing initial orders, established owners to venture into more exotic aquatics territory, and follow up on the quality of orders on a weekly basis. In essence Central Live allows Sea Dwelling to tap into the sales representative network already established by Central Garden & Pet while allowing the dry goods distribution giant to incorporate some livestock offerings while all entities actually remain distinct and responsible for their own sales and delivery.
It remains to be seen how this sort of cooperation and collaboration will work out but either way, this kind of creative initiative seems like a sign of good times in the aquatics industry.
