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THIS WEEK'S TOPICS:

• 🛩️ The Ulti-mutt guide to premium pet travel

• 🎥 Strays brings in $11.2M worldwide

• 🐔 Salmonella detected in Darwin’s Natural raw dog food

🛩️ THE ULTI-MUTT GUIDE TO PREMIUM PET TRAVEL

If you love dogs and dog puns, you are going to love Christi Scofield.

If you love dogs and traveling (and dog puns), then you are going to love her business, Jet Set Pets.

We already knew Christi had good taste since she's a subscriber to this very newsletter, so we sat down with her to learn more about her new company, whose mission is to be the premier pet-friendly travel guide to chic and unique hotels, restaurants, shops, and activities for discerning pet parents. Or as they put it "The Ulti-Mutt Guide to Pet Friendly Travel" (we told you about the puns!).

The Beginning

Over the last 7 years, Christi has visited 20 different states and countless cities with her rescue pup, Pamplemousse.

During her travels, she was constantly running up against the challenge of finding quality places to "wine, dine and recline" that were pet friendly.

The tipping point came on one trip when she was looking for a good place to eat.

Mix these travel challenges in with a background in marketing and SEO, and you have the recipe for a new entrepreneurial endeavor.

To validate her idea and the opportunity, Christi did research on competitors like Bring Fido to understand things like traffic, ad revenue, team size, and other aspects.

She knew that it was important to make sure there was a big enough market.

Fun note, this isn't Christi's first rodeo when it comes to starting a company! She launched a board game called Sexy Slang (think Pictionary for adults), which she pivoted into a clothing company using some of the fun sayings players came up with.

One of her shirts even made the poster for the movie She's Out of My League!

Getting Started

Most people have a great idea, do a little research, and stall out. So we wanted to understand what were the first steps that Christi undertook to get off the ground and gain momentum.

In this case, she did what she knew best, and traveled!

When we talked, she was fresh off a 15-day trip visiting 6 different cities to create a curated list of hotels, restaurants, and activities for you and your pooch.

Before that, she had done the same with Nashville, Charleston, and Savannah and had used those 3 cities as the starting point to create the website and initial profile structures.

The idea wasn't just to identify "pet tolerable" places, but really find the "pet enthusiastic places", and doing that in person was key.

Before she traveled, she would map out all the locations she wanted to check out on Google Maps so she was able to be efficient and cover enough ground.

One other strategic decision Christi made early on was to self fund the business instead of looking for investors.

She had worked with investors in previous businesses and felt that not having outside influence was going to help her execute and realize her vision.

Challenges & Plans

Launching a company ain't easy. We asked Christi what some of the early challenges have been, along with what plans she has for the future:

Looking to the future, the plan is to cover the majority of popular metro markets, and then start to move into travel advisory and bookings to enable partnerships with travel brands and pet brands.

The other big pillar beyond the content and partnerships, is community.

For revenue, the early strategy is affiliate links (getting a cut of bookings or other purchases through the site), and down the road will explore being an actual travel advisor along with partnerships with other brands.

Day to Day

Currently Jet Set Pets is in content creation mode.

They've done a lot of the research, but now they need to turn that knowledge into helpful content, and start to share that content online through their site and social media channels.

So most days are filled with writing and coordinating post creation with her writers and designer.

To attract customers, Christi is leaning on her SEO experience, along with social media, paid advertising, and joint promotion.

Tech and Tools

We love tech and tools, so we're always interested to hear what other people have used to be more efficient or deliver a great product.

To organize all the data and different profiles for each city, Christi uses:

• Airtable: a popular tool that is like excel on steroids.

• Wordpress: what the site is built on

• Elementor: a builder platform for Wordpress, and she chose a theme for the site that gave her the ability to create filterable views, a must in giving travelers the right results based on their needs (size of pet, hotel class, cuisine, pet fee amount, etc).

• ClickUp: a project management software

• Adobe Suite: for design

• Canva: for design

They did try to dabble in AI to tee up research for their trips, but found that the accuracy was lacking. They have used AI to generate post outlines and drafts, which they then write out and add info too.

The Differentiators & the Ulti-mutt goal

Christi sees Jet Set Pet's number one differentiator being curation.

Yes, many places are pet friendly, but if you only have three days in a particular city, which of the many options are the best to visit?

They want to help alleviate choice paralysis by not only narrowing down the options but also providing more info than just basic pet policies.

They answer questions like, "Is the hotel close by to green space for an emergency 2am potty break?”

“Is it a good place to stay if you want to hike in the morning or see city sights by foot and paw?”

“Is the restaurant’s dog-friendly seating near a busy road?”

“Do they have fans for hot days or covered seating for rainy days?"

The goal is to help readers have the info they need for a pawfect getaway.

And the best part is Christi's goal. She left her life in corporate America so she could start a business that would be successful enough so that she could donate significant amounts to shelters and rescue organizations.

Jet Set Pets will give a percentage of profits to organization in the cities they cover, as well as promoting those organizations and their people on the website.

When asked what advice she'd give an aspiring entrepreneur who was thinking about starting a business in the space, she left us with the following: "It is a happy business to be in! Enjoy the ride."

If you want to travel vicariously through Pamplemousse and Christi, you can catch them on social media here:

• Instagram

• Facebook

• TikTok

Right now the site covers Savannah, Charleston, Nashville, and Asheville but coming soon is New York, St. Petersburg, and Tampa. 

So, if you and your sidekick(s) plan on traveling and you want to do it in style, check out Jet Set Pets for the best curated hotels, restaurants, and more!

🎥 STRAYS BRINGS IN $11.2M WORLDWIDE

Homeward Bound might be our favorite childhood live-action dog movie (sorry Beethoven). So when we first caught whiff of Strays (the movie), we thought we might have a chance relive some childhood memories as adults…

However after watching the trailers these dogs drop f-bombs, eat magic mushrooms and are into some crude humor.

It’s the first R-rated dog movie produced. So basically if you take Homeward Bound and crank the raunchy meter from 0 to 11, then you get Strays.

We haven’t seen it yet, as it just hit the box office on August, 18th. A lot of mixed reviews so far, and it appears the quick takeaway is you have to have a love for dogs and just the right sense of humor.

With heavy hitter actors like Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Will Forte, Isla Fisher, and Randall Park - you’d think it would probably do some serious numbers.

However it’s box office debut came in at just over $8M and has now slowly climbed to $11.2M worldwide.

The Movie’s budget was $46M, so they’ve got a long road ahead to break even.

One cool thing to note was that 95% of the movie featured real dogs instead of the modern day use of CGI for everything.

Some also suspect that the poor performance might be due to the continued SAG-AFTRA strike, which meant Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx couldn’t publicly promote the movie.

Barbie & Oppenheimer were no match for the strikes, but future films might not be so lucky!

🐔 SALMONELLA DETECTED IN DARWIN’S NATURAL RAW DOG FOOD

The FDA has issued a warning against feeding pets specific lots of Darwin’s Natural Pet Products, produced by Arrow Reliance Inc., due to Salmonella contamination.

• Affected Products:

  • Darwin’s Natural Selections Chicken Recipe for Dogs, Lot 9774 (Jun 13, 2023).

  • Darwin’s Natural Selections Chicken Recipe for Cats, Lot 9795 (Jun 28, 2023).

  • Darwin’s Natural Selections Chicken Recipe for Cats, Lot 9830 (Jul 19, 2023).

• Packaging Details:

  • Sold online.

  • White and clear plastic packages.

  • Two-pound packages with four separate units.

  • Dog food: blue labeling, Cat food: blue and green labeling.

  • Lot codes located on the front of the lower left unit.

• Health Concerns:

  • Salmonella poses risks to both human and animal health.

  • Products sold and stored frozen, posing a concern that they might still be in homes.

KIBBLE BITS:

Every week we love to shoutout a pooch that has made another trip around the sun.

Happy 12th birthday 🎂 to this Jersey! Don’t celebrate too hard!

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

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