Why Koreans Opened Their Wallets for a Pet Purifier

The pet category on Wadiz, Korea’s go-to platform for market testing, has seen steady growth, with the number of project launches rising continuously. Riding this momentum, Dreame’s pet air purifier ran two back-to-back funding rounds on the platform — raising 107.58 million KRW in its initial launch, followed by a follow-up campaign that secured 70.9 million KRW. Here’s what’s changing in Korea’s pet market, how it shows up in Wadiz’s pet category, and exactly what Dreame did differently across its two campaigns.

Korea’s pet market, right now

One of the clearest signs of Korea’s shifting pet culture showed up somewhere unexpected: stroller sales. Pet strollers made up just 33% of total stroller sales in 2021, but that climbed to 57% by 2023 — overtaking baby strollers for the first time, according to Gmarket data. The trend hasn’t slowed since. Korea’s cumulative registered pet population reached 3.68 million as of the latest 2025 government survey, up 5.3% from the year before.

Pet humanization — treating pets as family members rather than animals to manage — keeps reshaping how people spend. There’s a Korean saying that’s become common lately, roughly “I’m the only one without a pet,” because these days about one in three households in Korea shares a home with one. That growing base of owners is spending more, too, on everyday products and services that make day-to-day pet care easier.

Pet tech is a powerful growth driver layered on top of all this. Global Market Insights projects the global pet tech market will grow from USD 19.1 billion in 2026 to USD 52.9 billion by 2035 — a 12% annual growth rate. High-tech pet products are moving past novelty status, becoming the kind of daily-use devices people expect to automatically manage a pet’s wellbeing.

What Wadiz’s pet category shows

Trend reports don’t answer the question a maker actually has: is this category worth launching in right now? That’s something you can only really see inside the platform itself.

Over the past year, Wadiz’s pet category has launched between 17 and 36 new projects a month, and the recent trend is notable — 20 in May, 28 in June, 33 in July, two straight months of growth. What matters more than the launch count, though, is the achievement rate. Even the weakest month averaged 403%, and the strongest hit 1,999%.

That tells you the category has a solid floor of demand. But it also means dozens of pet projects are already competing for attention every month, and supporters have likely seen several that look a lot alike. Simply being “a pet product” isn’t enough to stand out anymore — what wins is how clearly you can say what makes yours different.

How Dreame won, twice

The Dreame Pet Air Purifier AP10 raised 107.58 million KRW from 509 backers in June 2026, then came back a month later and raised another 70.9 million KRW from 210 more. Three things, layered together, explain how the same product hit its goal both times.

It solved a problem competitors hadn’t. The campaign opens with a question that lands immediately for anyone who’s owned a pet air purifier before: why does the thing become useless the moment pet hair gets near it? Existing purifiers clog at the intake, and once that happens, no filter — however expensive — keeps up.

Dreame’s answer was structural: separate the hair collection path from the air intake path entirely, so hair drops down while clean air rises up. Rather than stopping at a claim of better performance, the story backs it with a certified national test report and real CADR figures — proof over branding.

It removed every reason to hesitate. Running twice meant Dreame had to give people a reason to act now rather than later. The follow-up round made the stakes explicit: these specific benefits disappear once the campaign ends. That single point closes off the easy “I’ll just buy it later” excuse. On top of the urgency, the benefits themselves were kept sharp — four distinct points (a see-through design, a 5-layer filter, real-time remote control, triple hardware safety), each one clear enough to land in a single sentence rather than a paragraph.

It built trust by over-explaining, not under-explaining. The maker didn’t dress up the pitch. They said plainly that the AP10 was already a finished product, but that Korea didn’t yet have an established standard for what a “pet-specific” air purifier should be — and that this campaign was how they’d find out. Fund usage was broken down line by line: import costs, local customer support, product upgrades, platform fees. Shipping was handled the same way, with courier details, dates, and remote-area options all spelled out from day one. None of that needed clever copy to work. The sheer amount of information on the table did the convincing on its own.

For more details, check out the Wadiz Maker Center.