Ep. 049: On Launching an Innovative Pet Product Company — The Ken Goldman Interview

Product Launch Rebel

Hear the fascinating story of how Ken Goldman launched his dog gear company, Stunt Puppy. Learn how he started producing dog leashes and collars by hand, and how he utilized his professional marketing experience to grow the brand. Listen as he describes his number one lesson since starting Stunt Puppy, and who has most influenced him in his career. Hear why he chose to produce his products in the United States, and what has frustrated him the most as an entrepreneur.

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Transcript

John: Greetings Product Launch Rebels, and welcome to the Product Launch Rebel podcast, brought to you by Venturesuperfly.com, where we help double your entrepreneurial courage, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Please visit the Venture Superfly website and check out the contact page to join our mailing list.

Today we’ll be learning about the pet product industry, which should be a lot of fun. I’m interviewing Ken Goldman. He’s the founder of a unique brand of dog gear called Stunt Puppy. It offers products such as collars and leashes that are designed and made in the United States, right here in Minnesota. The company designs products with cues from the rugged camping and climbing gear industry, so they are extra durable. Seems pretty smart and cool. Ken’s products are available at StuntPuppy.com, as well as through many retailers across the United States. To learn more about his company, visit StuntPuppy.com.

Hello, Ken. Thanks for being here, and welcome to the Product Launch Rebel podcast.

Ken: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

John: Absolutely. This is going to be a lot of fun. Thanks for your time.

Ken, within this podcast there are three segments. The first is called “give me the basics,” which helps set the context about your company for our listeners. The second part is called “let’s get personal” where we get into some of the more personal topics about what it’s like to start a business. The final part is what I call “tell me how” where we’ll get to the heart of the matter on issues that aspiring entrepreneurs want to know now to help them move forward.

What do you think, Ken, are you ready for some questions?

Ken: I’m ready and I’m hoping you’re gonna tell me how at the end.

John: Fantastic, here we go!

02:29 — Ken, tell us the story. How did you originally come up with the idea to start Stunt Puppy?

Ken: It probably sounds cliché but it definitely was not on purpose. My dog Bauer and I, he was a golden retriever and we were a therapy team so we spent a lot of time in hospitals moving out and about and I wanted some gear that helped us move around the hospital easier and more fluidly. And that combined with the fact that I know how to sew, combined with the fact that I love gear, uh, it just all kinda came together. I went down to my basement and started making stuff for he and I. So we were, it’s definitely a happy accident. Um, then layer on top of that, I have another company that’s a marketing agency and we kind of looked at it and said, hey, we could build a brand around that. So that was 11 years ago.

03:31 — John: Yeah. That’s very interesting. And tell me about your sewing background. How did you get into that?

Ken: Definitely not on purpose. My mom, who still sews to this day, she’s a big quilter and so I was the youngest of three and just kind of hanging around so I stepped in a lot of pins and needles growing up and their fabric swatches all over the place and so I just wanted in on that. So I learned how to sell early and you know, I learned a sewing machine wasn’t something strange to me and I always kind of had one. It’s not that I was making myself clothes or anything, but I wasn’t afraid of a sewing machine. So when I got to the point where like, hey, I want to do this, I just pulled out the machine and, and went for it.

John: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s interesting that you were a sewer before that. I remember when I started my snowboard and ski clothing brand, I was not as sewer but I really sort of got interested in it, but I never took the time to do that. So I’m sort of fascinated by that.

Ken: Something just really cool about sewing in general. I mean it goes along with Legos and putting things together and I’m actually doing a week long sewing workshop in a couple months to kind of build out that skill even more for prototyping.

John: Yeah, very interesting. It’s so neat to make stuff.

04:56 — Ken, the pet product industry is just so competitive. So tell me what’s so unique about Stunt Puppy.

Ken: I will, but give me a minute because I want to talk a little bit about when people talk about the pet industry and how giant it is. And of course I should have the number off the top of my head, it’s like $70 billion, I think. And so when people look at a business and that, you know, they get really excited but it’s, it is so fragmented. One, I mean, first of all it’s not all dogs, right? Um, and there are more cats than dogs, just FYI. And then, so let’s slice off, get to just dogs and then you get to, well there’s specific kinds of owners and dogs that were relevant to which are basically active dogs and active owners, and there’s nothing against non active dogs and non active owners. And I define that as people who take their dog outside of the house.

Um, and this is a long way of getting to the answer your question, but essentially we try to really narrow our focus and build off our position. So if we just focused on these active dogs, active owners, which is really a small slice of that big market, and then within that market, try to focus on the ones in a more urban setting and really trying to build a brand around those people and speak to those people. So that’s number one, how we stand out. Number two, and this kind of dovetails into that, we’re not trying to be everything to everybody and so it’s OK to build things only for some of the segment. Another separate element of our unique character is that we are made in the US. Um, we feel really strongly about it and so we really try to, it’s about making the stuff ourselves, number one and building jobs in our own community and just basically building stuff that is as good, if not better than anything we’d use for ourselves, like our human gears, so to speak.

07:15 — John: What type of retailers do you sell to?

Ken: We focus on independent running store retailers because we focus on the running industry, but that doesn’t mean we’re not in pet stores. We are in some or even in some bike shops and things like that. But our, our effort and focus is in the running channel. And then interestingly enough we have, we have two distributors, one is in South Korea and the others in Japan. Our South Korean distributor is focused purely in pet. So we’re much more of a fashion brand there, which I mean everything is different there. And how we’re perceived there is different and it’s pretty cool because they didn’t ask us to change any of our gear. They’re just seen in a different light. And then in Japan we’re definitely seen as an outdoor brand. So along with selling gear, like outdoor, wearables for people and climbing gear, et Cetera.

08:19 — John: What types of products do you offer now?

Ken: The majority of our products, our leashes and collars with some special functionality, we also have a harness that is only about a year and a half old. That is has been received very well. It was five years in the making and later this year we are doing a joint venture with another company out of New Zealand and we’re bringing in a full line of outerwear.

John: That will be really neat and complicate your product mix a bit and to manage.

Ken: Very much so in a couple of different ways. One, OK, where are we making these things? Cause now I’m going to go back on what I said about made in USA. We will make the majority of that in the US, but there are a few things that need to be made in specific places because it’s the best place to make them. For instance, a dog flotation jacket we make in the best flotation jacket factory in the world. That factory is in China. There is a Merino jacket that we will continue to make in New Zealand because that’s where the wool is and it makes the most sense in terms of footprint, but probably everything else of their stuff will come to the US and get manufactured here.

09:45 — John: How many employees do you have now, and just give us some perspective, I think you started 11, 12 years ago. Give us also a look back into those early months. And given that we’re talking to aspiring entrepreneurs here, gives us a sense for how many employees you had during that first year, let’s say.

Ken: Well first year it was just me. It was literally making everything like with my own two hands and everything, so we’re a little different or I’m a little different in that I also own a marketing agency, so they’re a big piece of the effort. So right now 11 years in Stump Puppy has three full time employees but a full time marketing agency behind it. So it, and I can’t separate the two, so we’re more than three people, but there’s three people full time.

10:48 — John: Sure. How did you choose the name?

Ken: You know, it’s actually not a very interesting story. So many people ask me that. I wanted something where we get own the URL. I wanted something that was, that felt good to say that something that would be memorable and that’s really all there is to it. I wanted something that, you know, in terms of design, we could work with it in terms of letters and letter shapes. There’s a lot of dog gear out there that isn’t branded. You know, bottom line is I wanted something that kind of at least expressed active and people would remember.

11:29 — John: Say, Ken, most entrepreneurs go into business with a set of assumptions and many of those assumptions proved to be different from what they expected, thereby making them scramble to make changes in order to survive. Regarding Stunt Puppy’s uniqueness, did your original assumption about that prove motivating to consumers or did you discover a different selling proposition after being in business for awhile?

Ken: You know, I, I think the thing that changed from the beginning or that was emphasized more after we got going is that we should, I immediately thought, oh, this is going to need to scale wide and we’re going to need to, the line is going to have to be really wide. But as time went on, it was almost the opposite. So like, you know, what, if we just focus narrowly, like talk about people who run with their dogs, that’s something we can own, we can be authentic in and talk about it and produce better product so that it was almost like a reverse epiphany there. Um, the other one is I never would have thought how long it would take to develop some product, like the harness was literally five years and it wasn’t five years of constant working on it, but it was oh, we’re throwing that away. Oh, that’s no good. And every time we thought we had it, then it’s like, ah. Um, and there some of that was in the end realizing that there is no silver bullet, um, that maybe we just need to say, OK, this is what we’re going after. And it’s not going to be the perfect thing for everybody, but it’s going to get a nice, good, majority of the people looking for it.

13:17 — John: So Ken, let’s get personal on a few topics. Many aspiring entrepreneurs don’t know what they don’t know before starting a business, they’re sort of unconsciously incompetent in certain areas and they’re not as fully prepared as they thought they would be or should be in starting a business. If and especially, I’d love to get this answer from you, especially that the fact that you are a marketing guy. Before you started Stunt Puppy, to what extent were your previous career skills and your knowledge in line with the task of launching a pet product? Let’s say on a scale of one to 10, 10 being very aligned, how did your previous skills and knowledge fit with your new startup?

Ken: Well the marketing skills I felt really good about and even more specifically the brand skills, like in terms of building a brand, so I’m, you know, like sevens and eights there, but in terms of product development or manufacturing or quality assurance, I had no idea what I was doing. I was completely making it up.

14:36 — John: How about sales?

Ken: That’s a great question. And so often marketing gets lumped with sales and they’re so different. I had sold marketing services but never sold products into retail or distributors. So that was, yeah, I was completely green and probably good that I didn’t know what I didn’t know cause it’s, it’s a little daunting; I mean, trade shows sitting in a trade show booth for three days. There’s nothing that can prepare you for that.

15:05 — John: How much better of a marketing guy are you now? Since starting Stunt Puppy and having sort of that real life honest, authentic exposure to all the elements of the marketing mix now including product development and, and all the functions of a business.

Ken: I think a lot. I’m definitely more tolerant of a marketing guy now. I, for instance, if somebody can have this great idea for a product extension or something like that here and on paper it’s like, Oh yeah, that is a good idea. But there’s all those other things like what does that do to the SKUs and how does that reflect, how do get into stores that already have the associated product. And so just kind of feeling that pain. Um, even down to like how many UPCs are we going to be sitting over or regenerating UPCs or recycling them things that as just a pure marketer, if you’re working with a client, if they said something like that, you’d be like, oh, that’s ridiculous. Like, get over it. Let’s move on. I’m definitely getting more of that full picture or yeah.

16:19 — John: Ken, what’s the number one lesson you’ve learned since starting your company?

Ken: Stick to your positioning and don’t try to be something you’re not. Authenticity, people, they smell it. It’s amazing. I mean some of the feedback we get there, we have one comment we get, something about our attention to detail and you can really tell that these people really care about dogs. I would never write that marketing copy, but it’s 100 percent true. I mean from the way we turn a seam over on the inside of a collar that nobody would know, but it’s more expensive and takes longer to do, but we know that that is a more comfortable feeling on the inside of a collar for a dog. I mean, that’s it. You know, our, our tagline built from the dog up is that we really believe in that. Like that’s where we’re starting.

17:16 — John: Yeah. Ken, many entrepreneurs, including very successful ones have regrets in doing things incorrectly early in their entrepreneurial journey. And I think those regrets can reveal valuable lessons to aspiring entrepreneurs. Since you started Stunt Puppy, would you have approached the business differently if you could go back and do it over again?

Ken: Wow. I mean we’ve definitely made mistakes and continue to make mistakes. Like I’m sitting on hang tags that are deficient because I jumped into the project too fast and they don’t hold the product up, but I don’t know if I would’ve done anything different because unless we do something and fail, we’re not learning. And that sounds so cheesy, but I mean I guess I could think of if I would’ve gone another way in the beginning. I mostly think around the money side. Like if I would have brought in a bunch of other people and the money and maybe I’d be regretting that now, but I didn’t so I can’t complain there now. Definitely bumps in the road and different turns and tosses and tumbles, but that’s, I mean, it’s the journey. Um, and at the end of the day we’re working with people who are crazy about their dogs and that’s a pretty amazing audience.

18:44 — John: Yeah. It seems that 99 out of a hundred people can just talk about starting a business, but they never star one. It’s all show and no go in a way and starting a business is special and pretty unusual. What motivates a person like you, Ken Goldman, to stop just talking about launching a business and actually go out and start a pet product company.

Ken: You know, it’s just something I could really sink my teeth into and feel good about. It just hit all the right buttons in terms of, Oh, I’m working with my hands, I’m creating something, a building a brand. At the end of the day it’s with dogs that, I mean, it’s rare that we run into people who don’t have a good connection to dogs and if they don’t then we just, we’re not really talking to them in the first place. Uh, and some of it, you know, like I said in the beginning it was an accident and you know, I have this other agency that, you know, in some ways was a crutch in terms of, uh, you know, monetarily I didn’t have to worry about completely making it with this one thing, but I also had a lot of other people saying you can’t do two things. You can’t do both. You need to pick one or the other. And I don’t think that’s true. You can do two things and it’s, it’s not a perfect world,