Drs. Foster and Smith getting serious, Marine Depot eating market share?
Posted November 9th, 2007 by Ryan
It seems that Drs. Foster and Smith is getting deeper into the deep side of keeping saltwater reefs. They just launched Euro Reef protein skimmers. This is a huge step in offering a quality, medium cost protein skimmer for the advancing reef keepers in the United States today. With this addition along with adding Salifert test kits, Vortech water pumps, and nutri sea water they are letting everyone know that they are serious about reefs.
This deal probably was finalized or happened at MACNA a few months ago. This is in doubt from Marine Depot’s success at eating market share from the $210+ million/year master mail order company that is DFS. Marine Depot has had great success in offering niche reef aquarium products (over $1.3million in inventory) that DFS was not interested in stocking…until now.
Rumors abound that DFS Live Aquaria’s division is highly profitable, no doubt from premium prices on corals with the what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience and relatively inexpensive pricing on popular saltwater fish such as clowns, gobies, and beginners inverts. It would make perfect sense for DFS to make a separate catalog devoted to just us serious reefers. Weeding out the crap that most of us don’t even skim in their large tree hogging fish catalog, which is most for bleh, freshwater.
Marine Depot will continue to eat market share away from DFS by doing what they do best, adding niche saltwater reef aquarium products while DFS plays catch up.
Great post! Although, I may be a bit biased: I’m sitting inside Marine Depot as I type this response. I can tell you earnestly that we are dedicated to reefers and the saltwater aquarium hobby in general. We have a lot of exciting new things in the works but vow now to stray from doing what we do best: delivering the best products at the best prices and providing only the finest in customer support. And if you (or your readers) ever have a product recommendation, they can send it to me directly or post it to our blog and I’ll share it with the appropriate parties. Thanks for your kind words … they are truly appreciated!