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THIS WEEK'S TOPICS:

• 🌱 The $100M holistic dog company

• 📆 Find out how old your dog really is

• 😰 Which state has the most anxious dogs?

🌱 THE $100M HOLISTIC DOG COMPANY

Pawrents are more attentive than ever about the ingredients that goes into their dog’s food and products.

Many seek out products with shorter ingredient lists that are comprised of natural ingredients or at least stuff they can pronounce and comprehend.

Nobody knows this better than Natural Dog Company.

Who is Natural Dog Company?

Natural Dog Company is a brand dedicated to providing natural, effective, and holistic solutions for dogs.

Their products are formulated to address common canine issues, ensuring the well-being and health of our furry friends.

One of their notable products is the Wrinkle Balm, which is designed to treat issues related to a dog's wrinkles, such as itching, inflammation, and the accumulation of "wrinkle goo."

What’s in something like the Wrinkle Balm?

🥑 Avocado Oil: Nourishing omega-3 fatty acid with skin-nourishing essential vitamins, anti-inflammatory, & naturally promotes collagen regeneration to encourage faster wound healing

🌿 Rosemary Extract: Anti-inflammatory, powerful antioxidant, disinfectant & helps stimulate hair follicles for healthy coat & skin

🫒 Olive Leaf Extract: Anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and reduces pain stimuli to help soothe discomfort & calm irritation

🧼 Niaouli: An analgesic, bacterial, & antiseptic to relieve pain, kill bacteria, & inhibit bacterial growth & infections

🧬 Natural Vitamin E: Extreme antioxidant & preservative to boost collagen production and encourage cell regeneration

So how does a product like this stack up against the rest?

Well we compared these 5 ingredients to the leading seller of a balm listed on Chewy, and that balm contained 3x the amount of ingredients.

Some natural, some not and they only shared one ingredient, avocado oil.

Alongside balms Natural Dog Company has 3 other product categories:

• Supplements (new)

• Grooming

• Treats

All of their success has been contributed to online sales, namely Amazon.

A look at the numbers

We pulled the top 3 performing products within the last month from their Amazon storefront to see what some rough numbers might look like.

1. Paw Soother Balm, Travel Stick

• Price: $6

• Units sold in last 30 days: 7k+

• All time reviews: 50k

• 30 day revenue: $42k

• All time review revenue (solely based on review count): $300k+

2. Wild Alaskan Salmon Oil (16oz)

• Price: $25

• Units sold in last 30 days: 7k+

• All time reviews: 9k

• 30 day revenue: $175k

• All time review revenue (solely based on review count): $225k+

3. Snout Soother, Travel Stick

• Price: $5

• Units sold in last 30 days: 5k+

• All time reviews: 20.5k

• 30 day revenue: $25k

• All time review revenue (solely based on review count): $102k+

They have 67 SKUs offered through Amazon alone, which 19 of those have multiple thousands in sales.

Natural Dog Company is well into the multiple millions in annual revenue. They’ve mastered online sales channels and have now begun to go after regional retail stores.

While we don’t know the exact revenues, we do know that their goal is to scale to $100M, as you can see from the Twitter bio of the CEO, Bill D’Alessandro.

📆 FIND OUT HOW OLD YOUR DOG REALLY IS

In the hooman world, it's sometimes impolite to ask someone's age, but not in the dog world!

In fact, with our pups, it's often something we are dying to know.

Enter EpiPaws, an at-home test to determine your dog's age to within a year, and the 3rd winner of Purina's Annual Pet Care Innovation prize.

It's one thing if you get a puppy, a dog from a breeder, or find a rescue with great records.

However, for a huge amount of dogs out there, owners don't really know how old they are.

For the most part vets are making educated guesses to a dog's age based on things like looks, teeth wear, eye cloudiness, and other clues.

It's a bit like looking at the rings on a tree, only less accurate.

Enter Epipaws, whose at-home kit just requires a mouth swab and an envelope to give you your dogs age.

They analyze the results using epigenetics (a big word we had to look up, which means "the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work").

Epipaws analyzes a molecule called DNA methylation, which has been known to change with age in a predictable fashion (kind of like how the Dogonomist writers' bedtimes have been getting earlier and earlier as they get older 🤣).

Currently the test costs $120 and results take about 6-8 weeks (and they'll estimate your pup's bday date).

Some more interesting info from their site's FAQ:

• They plan to offer tests for horses and birds next (they also do cats currently)

• They do share your anonymized data with other researchers in the space

• They have wholesale options for shelters or vets

• If you are interested in investing, they do say to reach out to their CEO Dr. Andria Beal at [email protected]

You might wonder why it's important to know your pet's age? Well, some of the things that change with age are:

• Food they should eat

• Amount and type of exercise

• Health tests

• Benchmarks for organ function

Sometimes vets may only be able to estimate within 5 years, which is a huge portion of a dog's life.

So not knowing puts you at a disadvantage when trying to proactively manage their health.

This one gets two thumbs up from us 👍 👍

😰WHICH STATE HAS THE MOST ANXIOUS DOGS?

Oh stress and anxiety, two of our least favorite feelings.

While there is a lot of research and information out there when it comes to humans and stress, there doesn't seem to be as much data on dogs.

So when we came across an interesting study from TryFetched around google search data, we thought we'd share it here.

The Method

As a starting point, they used a tool called Ahrefs that provides internet search data to find the top 10 terms around dog anxiety in the US.

They then went to a tool built by Google (Google Keyword Planner) to confirm their findings and get additional search terms to use.

This gave them 20 different search terms along with an estimation of how many times they get searched each month in the US.

Those were:

Next was to break this down by state.

To make sure they could compare apples to apples, they used state search potential (or in Google "reach") to create a ratio of search volume / potential.

Results

What they were able to get down to was a rough number of "Searches per 1,000 people" by state.

This handy heatmap gives us a visual look at the results:

Their top 5 were:

1. Georgia (3.18 monthly searches per 1000 people)

2. Maine (1.67 monthly searches per 1000 people)

3. New Hampshire (1.53 monthly searches per 1000 people)

4. South Dakota (1.48 monthly searches per 1000 people)

5. Arizona (1.47 monthly searches per 1000 people)

And the bottom 5 (or most "chillaxed"):

1. Missouri (0.62 monthly searches per 1000 people)

2. Nevada (0.63 monthly searches per 1000 people)

3. Colorado (0.65 monthly searches per 1000 people)

4. Louisiana (0.73 monthly searches per 1000 people)

5. Minnesota (0.77 monthly searches per 1000 people)

They went one step further and came up with some hypothesis on why Georgia has the highest level of searches around dog stress and Missouri the lowest.

Georgia

• Rapid urban sprawl, coupled with high-density populations in cities like Atlanta. All this might lead to reduced open spaces for canine recreation such as dog parks?

• It could also simply mean that the owners' awareness of stress and anxiety in dogs is higher in Georgia when compared to the rest of the country?

• In a recent WalletHub survey, 51% of surveyed people in Geogria said they are financially stressed. Could some of that be transferred to their doggos?

Missouri

• 3 of the 5 lowest stressed states do belong in the central belt of the US and have more rural and open spaces. More room for dogs to roam and be happy?

• With less urban and metro areas, pace of life can be slower and more relaxed?

• Smaller towns and communities can have stronger social ties, and important contributor to lowering life stressors?

Conclusions

So what does this tell us?

We think it's less about what this information tells us, and more about thinking about the broader health and environmental impacts on our pooches.

Remember, the basis for this study is how people are searching on the internet, which the study uses as a proxy for the actual stress. So it doesn't definitively tell us anything (not that it needs to).

However, it is interesting to see some of the data gathered and go through the thought experiment to try and understand why.

You can check out the full study and results here, as we didn't cover every piece.

We think it's a creative way to look at information, and we are all for having these types of conversations!

DOGGYDEX™

Winner 🏆: BITCOIN

Proudly introducing the DoggyDex™, an index comprised of 10 publicly traded companies whose primary focus is the dog/pet industry.

List of tickers used can be found at the very bottom of the newsletter.

The yellow line-plot in the chart represents these companies above (DoggyDex™) and their combined performance against both the S&P 500 and Bitcoin on a weekly basis.

Pawformance is measured by % gains & losses.

• 🦁 The Mets implement the Simba Cam: Watch the footage from the Met’s Simba Cam, where fans hoist their dogs into the air in between innings.

• 🦊 The first-ever confirmed dog-fox hybrid: Scientists in Brazil determined that this dog that had been hit by a car was actually half fox as well!

• 🤳 Farm dog selfie: Check out this beautiful farm dog taking selfies showing off his farm.

DOGGY B-DAY

• $CHWY - Chewy: E-commerce platform for pet supplies

• $IDXX - Idexx Labs: Vet point of care instruments and vet software

• $FRPT - Fresh Pet: Pet food company

• $PETQ - PetIQ: Pet health products and medicines

• $PETS - PetMeds: Online pet pharmacy

• $ZTS - Zoetis: World's largest producer of meds and vaccines for pets and livestock

• $TRUP - Trupanion: Pet insurance company

• $WOOF - Petco Health & Wellness co.: Pet health & wellness company

• $BARK - BarkBox: Subscription service providing dog products, services, and experiences

• $PET - Wag! Group Co.: Tech platform that allows pet owners to connect with industry professionals for services such as, walking, training, etc.