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THIS WEEK'S TOPICS:

• $10K a month photographing dogs 📸 🐶 

• The recipe for launching a dog food business 🐩 🥘

• Future pet products: Whoop bands for dogs 🫀🐕

DOGGYDEX™

Winner 🏆: DoggyDex

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

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.

$10K A MONTH PHOTOGRAPHING DOGS 📸 🐶

The first rule in business is that naming things is hard!

Well J.B. Shepherd struck gold when he combined pup + portrait to come up with Puptrait, which is the name of his Baltimore based dogs only photography studio.

This isn’t just any dog photography studio, J.B. and his team put in a lot of work to create physical costumes, abstract conceptual backdrops, and their signature paper hats for each shoot!

They’ve managed to make quite a name for theirselves and their clients are happy to pay a nice premium for all of their dedication and patience to capturing the pawfect moment!

Puptrait offers 3 tiers of shoots:

1. Classic - no frills aesthetic for pups that might struggle to hold a sit or stay ($349 print commitment)

2. Paper Hat - creation of an eco-conscious artist-inspired costume custom made and fit just for your dog ($449 print commitment)

3. Conceptual - shooting with the intent of compositing a specific composition in post ($549 print commitment)

Their typical commission lands anywhere between $2.5k - $5k with their highest value single order coming in just under $12k.

Take a peek at some of their work 👇

This is a perfect example of making your offering incredibly unique and going for depth rather than scale when operating a business.

Excuse us while we scrape together points to catch the next flight to Baltimore.

THE RECIPE FOR LAUNCHING A DOG FOOD BUSINESS 🐩 🥘

The idea of launching a dog food brand seems really cool to us, but we realized that we have ZERO idea of what we'd do or how we'd be different.

I mean there are companies serving raw keto dog food for crying out loud!

Diet has one of the largest impacts on health, so we know it would be really motivational to work on, but what is it like to take the leap?

Our curiosity piqued, we came across a few stories of other people that have gotten into the food game and wanted to share some anecdotes. 📖

PetPlate 🍽️

Renaldo Webb started out working as a business consultant in the pet food industry. As a dog owner, he was a little surprised at what he learned about the ingredients and quality of mass produced foods. He decided that more health conscious owners like him would want an alternative to the run of the mill kibble, and struck out on his own in 2015 to create PetPlate.

He started by working with a vet nutritionist to create some recipes with fresh ingredients. From there he found a commercial kitchen and started producing small batches and then delivering them to customers.

Aside from the fresh "human-grade" approach, Webb wanted to differentiate by offering subscriptions specifically tailored to your dog and their weight.

Once he felt like the recipes were dialed in and he had his first 100 customers, he did what any budding entrepreneur would do, and signed up for Shark Tank!

Unfortunately none of the sharks bit 😢, mostly out of logistical concerns for the complexity of shipping fresh food to a growing customer base.

Luckily, Webb didn't let this stop him, and since then PetPlate has grown impressively, reaching north of 4,000 customers and raising a recent venture capital round of $19 million.

Jinx

Three early employees of the popular mattress company Casper had always bonded over their love of dogs, but felt overwhelmed when it came to picking the right food that was both healthy and cost effective.

Being used to the scrappy nature of a startup, they decided that they would solve their own problem by creating their own dog food.

One focused on providing great value on kibble with an emphasis on nutrition.

They used two main lessons they had learned from growing Casper to close to $500 million in revenue:

• Take the brand in non-traditional routes - To stand out in the mattress industry, Casper did things different, like getting hip hop artists to come to launch parties, offering free trials at home, and partnering with unexpected companies like American Airlines. Jinx has plans to collaborate with dog parks and work with celebrities like Chris Evans to stand out among the crowd

• Importance of the physical experience - While Casper was primarily an online business, they knew people needed to get a taste of their product IRL. One of their many techniques was the Napmobile, a mobile bus with 6 nap pods to show off the mattresses. Jinx has the idea to create a dog "lab" where dogs can come taste test formulas so owners can pick the best ones.

Some of the other tactics that helped them early on was partnering with companies that had an overlap that wasn't quite apparent at first. One of the founders realized that there was a crossover between their customers and Barry's bootcamp, so they helped create a joint workout for owners and dogs!

FUTURE PET PRODUCTS: WHOOP BAND FOR DOGS 🫀🐕

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) bills itself as the most influential tech event in the world.

It's an annual event held in Las Vegas that hosts presentations of new products and technologies in the consumer electronics industry. This massive event can have 3,000+ exhibits and 180,000+ people in attendance to gawk at the cutting edge of technology 📲.

Why do we care? Because of the dog gadgets of course!!

Here are some product highlights from this year's event to give you a sneak peak of what your dog's future might hold.....

A fitness tracker for your dog 🏋️

Tech startup Invoxia demo'd their biometric health collar, which measures heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep, and location for your pooch.

Their main pitches are that 1 in 3 dogs will get lost in their lifetime, and that 10-20% of dogs can develop hard to diagnose heart issues. Their smart collar solves both of those issues along with giving you a better picture of their overall health.

While not cheap ($249), we're excited about the visibility this sort of wearable brings to canine health.

'Talking' Pets 🎙

EVERYBODY wants to know what is running through their pet's mind. Well, with FluentPet, we might be one step closer.

Made up of buttons on a hexagon shaped plastic mat (or "hextiles"), you can record simple phrases (ex. "outside") that are played when the button is pushed. You can then train your dog to communicate by working with them to understand the meaning behind each button, until they are able to use them to talk!

This is one of those things that will definitely require work and a lot of patience, but with over 40,000 kits sold, they must be on to something.

The doggy tech stack ⌚️

Australian startup Ilume brought not one, but three integrated products to show off. Their combo of tracker, smart bowl, and smart hub helps create a personalized nutrition plan based on your dog's profile and activity, and then let's the owner know the optimal amount of food to give each day.

Thinking through the benefit of knowing an accurate caloric need to prevent overeating makes us think we might need something like this to help combat late night snacking.....

There you have it. Maybe not the future of pets we envisioned as kids (flying dogs that could tell us their deepest darkest secrets anyone?), but some pretty handy and accessible tech that can improve your fur baby's life.

KIBBLE BITS:

• Man defends dog from bear 🐻: This man took a swing at black bear to protect his dog.

• Your dog can now eat outside with you: The FDA has just approved “pet dogs” not just service dogs to dine with their owners outside at restaurants.

• NYC is deploying robot dogs: NYC recently used robot dogs to crawl ruins of a collapsed building, residents are concerned about the over surveillance from it.

Every week we love to shoutout a pooch that has made another trip around the sun. Happy 2nd Birthday 🎂 to the sassy rescue Roxy!

That's all there is to bark about this week.

If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter (@dogonomist).