Shortly after graduating from high school, Brian Butler started loading trucks at a UPS freight facility in Denver. Working nights for the next 16 years, he sometimes found himself so strapped for cash he had to choose between buying groceries and paying his mortgage.
Today he’s got a $350,000 pad overlooking the Caribbean, two homes in Denver and a six-figure stock portfolio. The source of his wealth? Crested geckos, docile creatures that resemble diminutive cartoon dragons. “I bought a condo in Belize,” the 37-year-old says. “Every time I visit, I think to myself, ‘I sell lizards on the internet. How the hell did I end up here?’”
He ended up there by selling a lot of lizards, for a lot of money. Five of his “designer” geckos, with unusual black-and-white markings, have sold for more than $50,000 apiece, and even those with less striking patterns typically fetch $300. Butler, who left his job at UPS in 2022 to focus full time on geckos, says his business pulls in $600,000 a year with just three part-time workers.
Butler’s prosperity has been helped by soaring interest in cold-blooded pets. Some 4 million U.S. households own reptiles and amphibians, and the market for the pets’ food and supplies hit about $800 million last year, up 60 per cent from 2019, researcher Freedonia Group Inc. says. Although the boom has prompted concerns from animal rights groups about the ethics of reptile e-commerce and captive breeding, they haven’t impeded growth. Globally, sales of enclosures alone are increasing at almost 8 per cent annually, and they’re projected to hit nearly $2.2 billion by 2030, according to Coherent Market Insights Pvt Ltd.
Hundreds of species, from bearded dragons to red-eared slider turtles to boa constrictors, can be found in local pet shops, at the 500 or so U.S. trade fairs a year focused on the animals and at online stores such as MorphMarket.com—the Amazon.com of cold-blooded companions. Kinova Reptiles, a Georgia breeder of ball pythons—a relatively small snake with a calm disposition and striking skin patterns—says it’s racked up sales topping $5 million a year. Of particular interest: snakes that feature a smiley-face emoji pattern on their back, via breeding that expresses recessive genes. “It’s not hard to make new combinations because there are so many possibilities,” says owner Justin Kobylka.
Social media has turbocharged interest, with owners and retailers posting photos and videos of people snuggling with their snakes and lizards. The Crested Geckos Facebook group has more than 37,000 members; Bearded Dragons Lovers has 137,000; and the Snakes With Hats Community has almost 150,000. (It’s exactly what it sounds like.)
Butler attributes much of his success to a surge of interest in geckos in South Korea during the Covid-19 pandemic. He says buyers stuck in lockdown became obsessed with the creatures, which at the time were widely available in the US but not in that country. Buyers who saw Butler’s Instagram account and website spread the word to friends, and he soon found brokers who dealt with customers abroad and took care of shipping the animals in ventilated containers.
His passion for geckos dates to 2007, when he saw one at a Denver pet shop and asked to hold it. “They almost feel like suede,” he says. “They’re kind of goofy looking—they’re cute.” He spent hours on internet forums and chatting with breeders to understand the trade. At one point, scrolling through a seller’s profile on MySpace (yes, MySpace!), he “realized this is just a dude like me,” he says. Fascinated with the idea of creating distinctive color combinations, called morphs, he started raising the lizards on his own. “Breeding and collecting geckos is like Pokémon for adults,” Butler says. “It’s the excitement of the challenge to collect each different morph.”
Soon, Butler had 400 geckos crammed into his apartment—and $15,000 in credit card debt from buying them. Included in that amount was the $1,200 he’d paid for a pinstriped, white-spotted red gecko he named Ghost. That sum was believed at the time to be the most anyone had paid for a crested gecko, which helped him gain the attention of the lizard-breeding community. In 2011 he founded Altitude Exotics. The next year, he and his brother bought a 2,600-square-foot house in Denver, and he filled the entire first floor with gecko enclosures. (He and the lizards still live there; his brother moved out.) That year, he did about $20,000 in sales.
Butler continued to fuel gecko prices. In 2013 he paid a London breeder about $35,000 for 23 geckos with a rare black-and-white morph—the only ones with that pattern at the time, giving him a monopoly on their genes. He spent five years breeding them, aiming to diversify their gene pool for hardiness while fueling anticipation on social media—and sparking interest in Korea. He currently has about 3,500 geckos and sells about 2,000 a year. “It gets better every day,” Butler says. “I am the luckiest guy in the world that this is what I get to do for a living.”
Karen Angel is a freelance writer who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley
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