Last month I wandered around the national trade show for pet retailers, SuperZoo. I was there to scope out new items to sell at Positive Approach, a dog-training, day-care, pet boarding and retail store in Tacoma. I saw an eclectic array of goods including pet furniture worthy of an 18th -century English manor, homeopathic meds for Fido and the Furminator pet hair elimination tool. But mostly I saw real entrepreneurship, vendors and buyers in real-time, not the mythical ones that politicians like to pander toward.
I loved talking to the entrepreneurs about how they got their idea, why they were passionate about it and what prompted them to start it. The essence of small business is relationships built on trust. I can’t even count the number of vendors who told me that they like to know who they are dealing with and look them in the eye. I was struck by the high number of women at this event who were the product creators as well as the buyers.
One of the businesses that intrigued me the most was Dog is Good . I had long been a fan of the company’s irreverent, humorous products such as my teenage son’s t-shirt that reads, “It’s all fun and games until someone ends up in a cone.”
Read the rest of this blog about Dog is Good and founder Gila Kurtz perspective on "Big Mutts" and "Dog Codependency." PermissionSlips is written each week by friends and co-writers Carol Lewis Gullstad and Linda Williams Rorem.
