It’s not the 40 percent growth a year or the international shipments that make Poochie Pets founder Cheryl Pedersen glow with pride.
For Pedersen, her greatest joy comes from working with canines.
“How could you not love it?” the Simsbury business owner said as she reached down to pet her office mate, a pug named Gibby.
Poochie Pets has been in business for five years, four of which were spent working out of Pedersen’s basement. Since its start, Pedersen says she has made over 200,000 pet items — everything from a special link on a leash for a pet owner to stash keys to the ever popular doorbell potty training tools.
These items, known as Poochie-Bells, are designed to make a dog owner’s life easier. They hang over a doorknob or hook and the idea is that the pet learns how to knock into them when it has to go to the bathroom. Pedersen recommends starting a dog using the bells at 10 weeks old.
Pedersen says her products can be found in boutiques and mid-sized chains “in every state in the U.S. except the Dakotas.” She also has international distribution in several countries including Switzerland. She says she intends to keep her products out of huge retail stores. She takes pride, she says, in the fact that they are only available to small and medium-sized pet stores, which she sees as part of her marketing niche.
“We’ve been growing about 40 percent a year,” she said. “We hit the million mark last year. I expect to grow another 40 percent in 2010.”
Pedersen had been living in Boston and working in the software business when her family moved to Connecticut five years ago.
“I gave up my 9-5 job and I was bored, so I got a dog. I had a really hard time training him. One day, I made a shoe string bell and it was amazing. It worked,” she said. “All my tennis friends back in Boston wanted one. They told me to sell it. Eventually, I started a website and made my first sale.”
In her business’ infancy, Pedersen would frequent craft stores for bells and ribbons which she would then fashion into Poochie-Bells. Eventually, as she started to receive more and more orders, she says she realized she needed to think bigger. She put in about $50,000 cash, maxed out her family’s credit cards and took out a loan from a local bank to get her business off the ground.
Staying local, she said, is a key ingredient to her business. She uses a local artist in Simsbury’s Tariffville section to design her ribbons and a company in Connecticut to manufacture her bells. She believes her business wouldn’t operate smoothly if it weren’t for the Simsbury Post Office, which she says “bends over backwards for us.”
To succeed in the pet industry, Pedersen says, she is always innovating. She’s added eco products and replaceable ribbons to her lines. While on an African safari recently, she met a man from Botswana who she now works with in creating a special leather product. She also frequents over a half dozen trade shows a year to keep up with the latest trends and keeps several “reps” on the road selling her products.
She says she’s lucky, too, that the pet market isn’t suffering right now like the rest of the economy.
According to the American Pet Products Association, U.S. spending on the pet industry spending is estimated at $47.7 billion up, from $45.4 billion in 2009.
Joanna Smiley, a Hartford area freelancer, writes the weekly Local Insight column for The Hartford Business Journal.
