The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Welcome to The Third Growth Option, where we're not just talking about growth—we're making it our mission.
At TGO, we understand that success isn't a fixed destination; it's an ongoing journey with twists, turns, and unexpected detours that take us to new places. Those moments are our Third Growth Options, where we throw away binary choices to create our own path.
Hosted by Benno Duenkelsbuehler, O.G #GrowthNerd, we're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside of business, one episode at a time. From humble beginnings to Fortune 500 companies, our stories are not just about business—it's about the relentless pursuit of greatness in every aspect of life.
With each episode, we don’t just want to share insights—we want to empower business owners across all frontiers to carve their own path to success, their way.
Want to learn more?
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The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Building a Dog-Toy Brand - with Adam Baker
Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ?
We sit down with Adam Baker, founder of SodaPup Dog Toys, to uncover the strategies that took his brand from concept to success.
Adam shares how his background with top brands like Nike and Under Armour informed his approach to building a customer-centric brand that resonates deeply with its audience. You'll learn how rapid product development and fashion-inspired cycles can keep offerings fresh and exciting, helping them yo stand out even in traditionally slow-moving industries.
Laslty, Adam discusses the importance of an omni-channel strategy and how to adapt to the shifting digital landscape to scale your business globally as well as leveraging direct sales on platforms like Shopify to forming partnerships with subscription services, like Bark Box, for growing a brand’s reach.
Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this conversation offers actionable advice on how to build a brand that not only captures attention but also fosters lasting customer loyalty. Tune in to learn how you can apply these strategies to grow your business and thrive in today’s market.
Always growing.
Benno Duenkelsbuehler
CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN
Hey, welcome to the Third Growth Officer podcast, where we talk about all things growth, yes, even and especially those hard parts where you shed some skin and pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Hey, I'm Benno Dunkelspüler, growth Sherpa and OG hashtag growth nerd. We're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside the business. One TGO episode at a time, pretty much.
Speaker 2:All right, I'm Adam Baker, I am the founder of SodaPup Dog Toys and I am calling in from beautiful Boulder, colorado, and I am calling in from beautiful Boulder, colorado.
Speaker 1:Hey, adam, I'm so glad to have you on this podcast. I enjoyed getting to know you a little bit before this podcast and doing some research on your story, your journey, your company, and I really want to focus this conversation on four different things I want to talk about. I want you to give us a little flyover of your journey. You spent the first 20 or so years of your career on the corporate side with big brand names Nike, under Armour, crocs and then, 12 years ago, you started SodaPup and I want to talk. You know I want you to talk about the product, the brand and how you built the brand, your distribution and throughout this, I know you're going to weave in your entrepreneurial journey and I came up with a very high-tech device. Everybody knows what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about product brand distribution and the journey, and I'm going to use that as a cue card if you talk too long.
Speaker 2:That's an impressive chart, Benno.
Speaker 1:I know it's an impressive chart right. I made that all by myself.
Speaker 2:10 minutes ago um talk about the.
Speaker 1:Uh, maybe let's start with the brand, the soda pup brand. You found it 12 years ago.
Speaker 2:Talk about the brand so, um, I wanted to create a brand in the pet space that had personality. I wanted something that was playful, whimsical, beautiful, and of course, you know my thinking about the brand has evolved over time. But, yeah, we wanted to. I saw a lot of opportunity in the pet industry when I first started exploring the possibility of starting this business, and I saw a lot of slow moving brands in the pet space. The assortment was always the same. The assortment was the same regardless of whether you're a big box or a small pet specialty distribution same regardless of whether you're a big box or in small pet specialty distribution. And so I wanted to create something that was more dynamic, that moved more quickly, that introduced more product newness. Essentially, I wanted to apply the kind of the fashion cycle that we used in the sporting goods industry you know, new collections at least every six months, if not every three months, and see if I could use that kind of product development cycle in a relatively slow-moving pet space. So that's kind of how we got started.
Speaker 1:And you really focused the brand. I mean you talk a lot about being customer-centric and customer-intimate and using the Nike playbook of really getting to know the customer. How do you do that? How do you know who your customer is and what he or she wants?
Speaker 2:Well. So, again, the opportunity that I saw in the pet space was that most of the products I saw were either shaped like paws or shaped like bones. You know fairly straightforward, not terribly creative types of designs, and so you know. One of the things you learn at Nike when you're on the product side like I was is that you know everything is about the consumer, consumer, consumer, consumer and in the case of a brand like Nike, there's the you know what does the consumer need for their specific sport? There's the you know what does the consumer need for their specific sport? So I looked at the pet industry and I thought none of this really looks geared towards a person. And so, you know, we have a Shopify store, and so I get data on who's buying from our site, and it was pretty clearly a female-dominated population about 70% women and so I thought well, what if we really focus our energy on designs that will create some sort of emotional connection with her?
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, the dog is not the consumer, the person with the purse is the consumer, and so we want to Certainly not the decision-maker, maybe the consumer, but not. Is not the consumer the person with the purse?
Speaker 1:is the consumer, and so we want to Certainly not the decision maker. Maybe the consumer, but not the decision maker. Not the decision maker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know. So our approach was quite different. We wanted to literally create an oh my God, gotta have it. Moment at retail. You know, I'm sure you know you've heard that you have like one and a half to two seconds to capture a person's attention at retail, and so if everything looks the same, you know it's difficult to do that, and so you know we're relying on, on beautiful designs that are very different from anything else in the space to capture their imagination and kind of pull them in to take a closer look, and then they discover, you know, great quality, beautiful color, as well as the design, and great functionality as well.
Speaker 1:So now is a great you know I had asked you, hey, let's do this video podcast recording in front of your magic wall, behind you, talk about your product. I mean, you have this sort of assortment matrix in your head, right where you have collections, you know, within collections and across categories. I found that fascinating. Just talk us through your thought process on building the assortment over the years.
Speaker 2:So you know again. You know I think traditionally in the pet industry pet brands are selling things, items, and you know there's nothing wrong with that. But there's so much more you can do from a merchandising perspective to accelerate selling by adding layers of storytelling. In the enrichment category there were brands that were making Lickmats and there were brands that were making slow feeder bowls, but nobody really kind of pulled it all together into a bigger story and so we created a broad enrichment story and then we created product types that roll up into that story. So for instance, our Lickmats we call E-mats, the E stands for enrichment. And then we have E-bowls, which is a slow feeder enrichment bowl. And then we created other products E-coins, which can be used for separation anxiety for a dog, an E-tray, which is a shallow slow feeder. Even our nylon bones have patterns on the surface that you can smear food into.
Speaker 2:So we've taken traditionally a durable nylon chew bone and turned it into an enrichment device as well as a chewing device. We call those e-chews. We have e-cups, like our honeypot. It's basically a cup that you can put food inside. And so through our naming conventions e-cups, e-mats, e-trays, e-bowls everything's being pulled together into a bigger story that the consumer can understand. And then, even within that, we've got certain design themes that will run across our multiple product types.
Speaker 2:So, for example, honey plays a big role in some of our products. So we have a honeycomb slow feeder bowl, we have a honeycomb lick mat, we have a honey bear treat dispenser I don't know if you've ever gotten the honey dispenser, so it's shaped like the honey dispenser. We've got honey bones, we've got, you know, honey pots, and so what we're doing is giving a retailer so many different ways to build an assortment in their store that that tells a bigger story. So you know, the basic idea is that when you combine these things in this way, the sum is more valuable than the individual parts. We don't want to sell an item, we want to sell a bigger idea, because when you do that they'll buy multiple items. We have people that buy all of our Likmats. They collect our Likmats. We have degrees of difficulty built across our products. So if you're a skier, you know there's a green circle is the easiest slope, a blue square is an intermediate and a double black diamond is the most difficult. So we've lifted that communication system.
Speaker 1:I'm a skier, so the double black diamond is the woohoo we diamond is going down the mountain and we're going to break a knee Hopefully, not.
Speaker 2:So we've taken that rating system and applied it to our lick mats so then you can choose the right mat for your dog, because different dogs have different levels of food drive. You know different levels of food drive, so you know we have lots of. At the end of the day, merchandising is about storytelling, and so we have material stories. We have design themes stories, we have level of difficulty stories, we have color stories. We have color stories. Yeah, you know, we use more of a kind of a home decor color palette versus traditional dog toy colors, because we're appealing again to to a woman in a lot of what we make our feeding systems, which will be on the kitchen floor most likely, so you want it to look nice. So you know, I've basically brought a lot of the bag of tricks from my prior experience in footwear and apparel and tried to, you know, drive those into this industry where it hasn't historically existed.
Speaker 1:I love the you know product that I see in the background hanging on the wall and because I can see that product. Look, you know, I think of our kitchen and living areas and the house and those colors wouldn't? You know, I would like them and they wouldn't bother me and I think that they would be kind of fun. Um, and you know, they sort of inject energy and into the home environment as opposed to, you know, as you said, the, the pet industry is a. There's a lot of commodity product out there where, uh, brands and vendors are just trying to compete for shelf space by price and by, you know, shelf fees and it's not. People are not that passionate about making it look like fun and cool colors and cool stories behind it and you're just sort of, you know, the Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory about approaching your product category right and I think that translates People get that right, that your passion for the product shows up on your website and on the shelf at the end, don't you think?
Speaker 2:Well, hopefully, you know we don't want to be a commodity business, right, it's very difficult, it's a race to the bottom, and that's not what I was interested in. You know. The reality is I started this business as sort of a, as an academic challenge for myself, for some great entrepreneurs like Kevin Plank at Under Armour, and I always thought, you know, do I have the right stuff? Can I create something from nothing, you know, and so I picked an industry where I had no experience, I had no contacts, basically started at ground zero and then, you know, slowly but surely started to figure it out, and you know the things that we've talked about.
Speaker 2:You know, thus far in this conversation, I didn't start with all of those ideas. You know we it's been a long and winding road. You know a bit of trial and error to see what works, what doesn't work, and you know I've been pretty committed to not doing a raise, not taking other people's money. I do have one investor who's a wonderful partner, but beyond that I've been committed to growing organically. And so what that means is I have to be profitable, right, and I love the constraint of having to be profitable because it forces me to make. I can take risks, but they have to be prudent risks. I don't have a pile of money sitting somewhere, and so it's forced me to be creative, it's forced us to, you know, try new things and and some things are dead ends and other things really take off, and then, you know, you kind of switch gears and and chase the thing that's working, and so, like I said, it's been a long and winding road to get where we are today but here you are, 12 years into it.
Speaker 1:You know you've got I mean you, you, you have seen some great successes and you have. You know you are, you're, your product is in 50 different countries. You've got a number of employees helping you. I mean this is not a one man band any longer. Right, and talk a little bit on the product side. I thought it was interesting how to you the product cycle like the more introductions you have in a given year, the more opportunity you have for making a splash in the marketplace, giving you an excuse to post something on social media or do a press release. Talk a little bit about the power of product introductions as really an advertising vehicle for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So let me just back up a little bit and say we produce everything in the United States, and there's some challenges with suppliers who can fulfill orders very quickly, and so what it allows me to do is have a broader product offering that is shallow on inventory, and then I can chase demand as I need it, whereas most of my competitors who produce in Asia, they have a narrow product offering, and because they're producing in Asia, they have to go deep on inventory so that they don't run out.
Speaker 1:And so so we've kind of have to fill a 40 foot container.
Speaker 2:They got to fill a 40 foot container and then they got to wait 45 days for it to quickly, and they can't. There are barriers to experimentation, right, because they have to swing for the fence every time to make model work. What we can do, what we have done, is we have built injection molding systems that have allowed me to lower the costs so that, as long as I operate within one of the systems that we created, I can make a new product introduction relatively inexpensively and quite quickly, and so it's allowed us to have a much broader product offering. For a company our size. A lot of people scratch their heads, I think, and look at us like how the heck are they doing this right? So, because we produce in the USA, it allows us to do certain things.
Speaker 2:The other thing is that we have grown around the world because of our social media following, primarily our Instagram account, but also Facebook and, to a certain extent, tiktok, and so you know, if I have the choice between spending money on a new product mold or a print ad in a pet trade magazine, most of which are going digital now, I'll do the new product every day of the week because I can post it on Instagram and get enough sales within the first 30 days to cover the cost of the mold. And so the kind of the light bulb went on for me and said well, if I can continue to put new products into the market like every month, or a couple of products a month, then I always have something to talk about. I always have people looking forward to what we're going to do next and I'm still going to get coverage in the pet trade magazines because I'll be in the new product section or I'll get interviewed and so and I do like to support them with advertising when I can. But the reality is we're creating our own weather because we keep introducing new things, and so there's a lot of conversation about Soda Pop. We're, like I said, in a relatively slow moving pet industry. We're pretty exciting because we have a lot going on all the time, and so it's been fascinating how we can use new product development as a marketing vehicle.
Speaker 2:It basically is the in a sense it is the Nike model right, make cool product, put it on athletes in our case put it on social media with influencers and consumers and distributors and retailers, and then pull that product through the retail channel. So our first order of business isn't to launch a new product with a retailer. It's to launch the product on our website, sell it to consumers and then pull it through retail. So we have retailers calling us. How do I get that? How do I get that? So it's a pretty different model.
Speaker 1:Pulling is a lot better than pushing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, like you said, it's a commodity business, right, and so if I haven't already generated the demand, then the retailer wants me to give them a discount to offset their risk. Right, because they don't know if the product is going to sell or not. But if they already know it's going to sell and I know it's going to sell I know I don't need to discount in order to get the product placed. So it's a much better, it's a much healthier brand building experience to not be promotional all the time.
Speaker 1:Of course. Of course, because nothing you know. I mean you refer to that earlier correctly, as you know a race to the bottom where you know you're just, you know, out discounting and out promoting and out, you know, sale, sale, sale, sale. Instead of talking about, hey, this is really cool, hey, look at the color, look at the function, look at the, you know how this fits in. Crazy, um, alchemy, right of product and design and distribution and branding. That you understand you get. And when I look at your website and I look at the products behind you and and I look at your face describing your, your product or brand, your business, you're excited about it. You're just experimenting.
Speaker 2:It's a bit of an obsession, I'll admit. But the other thing is, I think that we can really help retailers too, because no retailer really wants to discount themselves right. Why give away margin if you don't have to? So you know, the broader vision is that if we do great storytelling and we create beautiful designs, they command a higher price that people are willing to pay for it. You know if, if I'm just competing with a stainless steel bowl against another stainless steel bowl manufacturer, I don't really have a reason for being. But if I have a beautiful, like a flower bowl, which we just launched this week in pink and purple, you know, and that's what I'm offering in opposition, I guess, to the stainless steel bowl. Those are radically different and higher perceived value because of the beauty and the color and the design, and so we can help retailers improve their margins at the same time.
Speaker 1:So talk, give us more background or maybe an overview of your distribution model. So you mentioned Shopify, you mentioned retailers, you mentioned I know you're unfair, right, so talk. How do you think about your distribution model? How did you get into 50 countries?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so distribution is an interesting thing because the pet industry is largely driven through distributors. If you go back to the beginning of the pet industry, people were selling dog food and cat litter. It was a replenishment type of business with consumables, of business right With consumables. But no distributor wants to carry a brand unless there's demand for the brand. So it's up to any brand, any new brand, like we were, we have to create the demand ourselves. And so before any distributor would touch us, we had to get into enough retail stores to make it worthwhile. They didn't want to build it for us, they wanted it in place beforehand.
Speaker 2:So you know, in the beginning we, we sold through the Shopify site and then I did some, some. Like I said, it's a long and winding road and you do what you, what you have to to be profitable. And so way back in the beginning, um, I was introduced to a subscription box called Bark Box and they were in their very early years, like they're behemoth, now publicly traded. But at the time they were a small box and they needed new products that fit a theme, a monthly theme, every month. And you know, I got a series of orders from them, um, ranging from 20,000 units to 130,000 units, um, and so I quickly realized it's like oh, these guys can drive a lot of volume. Maybe I should look at other subscription boxes and see if anybody else needs this type of support. So I went to the second largest subscription box and I said look, we can be your easy button as you grow. It was a. It was a box called Bully Make and they specialized in durable rubber, in durable products for power chewers. And as they were growing it was getting harder and harder for them to find products that fit their theme, that fit their price point, where they could deliver the volume that they needed in a very short window of time. And so I went to the founder of that box, the owner of the business, and said listen, I can design you a new rubber dog toy every month and I'll sell it to you at my cost. The only catch is I own the designs and I own the molds, so you'll get an exclusive product for 30 days and then, when you're done with it, I'll roll it into my product line and then we're on to the next toy for the box. So I did that for years, for over three years, and then he got big enough and wanted his logo on the toys, which is all understandable and they started to produce their own because I wasn't interested in producing their product and I was selling it to them literally at cost, including the cost of the mold, but at cost. So there was no way for me to make money building his toys with his logo. So they went off and did that themselves. But then I had, you know, 35, 36 beautiful American made natural rubber dog toys and so I turned my attention to building my own brand. So that was one of the kind of the first things we did to survive.
Speaker 2:And then we expanded into nylon toys and brought a lot of innovation to that category. You know, most nylon toys are bone shapes. We think outside the bone do lots of other fun shapes with enrichment capabilities. And then we expanded into other types of enrichment toys lick mats and slow feeder balls and then the business just took off enrichment toys, lick mats and slow feeder balls and then the business just took off. And the reason it took off is because those types of products really allow you to do some fun like graphic design. I think of our lick mat business like a graphic t-shirt business, where everybody has more than one graphic t-shirt, right? You buy it because you like the graphic, and so that's what's happened. We've turned a pet supply into a collectible by putting really fun graphic designs on the product. Did I answer the question? Absolutely, I don't remember what the question was.
Speaker 1:No, we started talking about distribution, distribution, and look all four of these things on my highly technical chart here of product brand distribution and your entrepreneurial journey. They're all related to each other right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they really are. So just to close the loop on that so the work with the subscription boxes allowed us to build our assortment. It funded our product development for years. But I wasn't really doing a lot of distribution. I was doing some, but not much outside of supplying the box. But when that went away then it was like, okay, I really need to shift gears here and I started marketing the brand. And then we started opening independent retailers and then we expanded into nylon and it started to build on itself. And then I had a retailer email me and say have you heard about FAIR? Your brand would be great on this platform. And I'd never heard of them. And they had just started expanding into pet. They started in the gift space.
Speaker 1:So this is back 2018-ish.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we joined FAIR and I was stunned by the volume we did right out of the gate on FAIR. And so I worked hard to cultivate the FAIR business, because if you introduce retailers to the platform then they're commission-free for life. So I had a stake in getting as many people on board as quickly as possible to take advantage of that. And then they expanded to Europe and then our business started to expand pretty quickly into Western Europe through FAIR. And then, once we started establishing that independent pet retail footprint, then the distributors started calling and saying hey, we keep seeing your product in these stores, we're interested in distributing your product. And so we started opening distributors as well. So we sell direct, we sell direct to retailers, we sell through distributors, we sell through platforms like fair and wholesalepetcom, um, so we're really kind of omni-channel at this point terrific which I think you have to be honestly nowadays.
Speaker 1:Well, I, I, I agree, uh, that you know the.
Speaker 1:I agree that the more channels you're covering, the safer your business is, certainly from a perspective of not being, as the PE guys say, disintermediated, and one beast can feed the other in terms of channels.
Speaker 1:One beast can feed the other in terms of channels, right? So I love how you've built a strong brand with a fresh perspective from the product design perspective, an entertaining way to get your name known through social media, through, you know, monthly or so introductions, product introductions. It's a really great story that you probably had no idea 12 years ago when you said you know what, I'm going to see, if I can start, you know if I can make my product and branding brain work in an unknown industry called pet industry. And I think the fact that you're constantly thinking about all the challenges product distribution, brand from the consumer's, the decision maker's perspective which, again, a lot of your competitors do not, a lot of them are sort of locked into the business cycle and the product development cycle and the sourcing matrix of well, we have to do it this way and that way, sourcing matrix of you know, while we have to do it this way and that way, but you're constantly thinking of new ways to solve the Rubik's Cube right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, even beyond the pet industry, one of the challenges for a mature business is figuring out how to behave differently. You know how to get outside of their. You know the structures that they've built, the processes that they've built, and the beauty of being an upstart is, I don't have any of that, and you know, the funny thing to me is that in a sense, I'm an e-commerce entrepreneur. We do all of our business digitally. In a sense, I'm an e-commerce entrepreneur. We do all of our business digitally, right, even our distributor orders are coming in digitally. Our fare orders go directly. You know the workflow is directly through our Shopify store. So in a sense, I'm an e-commerce entrepreneur. We didn't even have personal computers when I was in college, so I'm 62. So the fact that I'm an e-commerce entrepreneur kind of cracks me up. But what it says is that you do not have to build a business the same way today that you did 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago when I worked at Nike. Nike was primarily a domestic business.
Speaker 2:They weren't even in the sport of soccer or football, as you would call it, but they felt like they couldn't expand into Europe or Latin America or Asia until they had firmly rooted the brand in the United States, until they had firmly rooted the brand in the United States, whereas what I'm doing is I'm growing the brand everywhere all at once.
Speaker 1:Right, and it's because of social media. Right, the world has gotten a lot smaller. And I would even phrase it. You said you don't have to run the business the way you used to 10 or 15 years ago. I would say you have to run it differently.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't be constrained. It's like no, the way you're running it the next I mean the way you're running it this year is different from pre-COVID, and the way you're running it next year is different from this year and last year. It's things are. I mean, technology and digital transformation and digital touch points are changing so fast and faster and faster and faster that you know, you and I have to get you know, stay young or stay with the times and keep having fun, and your business has gone through a number of inflection points where, of course, you're acting differently.
Speaker 1:You know, zero to the first dollar, the first dollar to the first million dollars the first you know, and then at $10 million it becomes a different game, At $20 million it becomes a different game. And I mean, that's what I love, right? That's what I love about your story, that's what I love about my business is figuring out how to act age appropriate, essentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure it's. The nice thing about entrepreneurship is that no day is like a prior day. It's always changing and you're learning new things and, like you said, as we continue to scale, my focus will have to change, or I will have to, for sure I'll have to hire people that help with the operations of the business so that we can fulfill, you know, greater and greater demand. The interesting thing now is we've created this great, this really great foundation of independent pet specialty retailers around the globe and now we're bringing on a lot of regional chains. We haven't gotten to big box yet no Petco, no PetSmart but we're bringing on these regional chains, but not just in the US but other parts of the world, and it's it's all kind of happening at once, and so we're we're taking big bites of the elephant.
Speaker 1:You know, at this point, one bite at a time, but big bite at a time. Yeah, yeah, Terrific. Well, I think we'll have to do another podcast. You know a few elephant bites later on, you know, maybe in a year or two years. I think your brand is fascinating. Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far in the first 12 years. Let's see what the next 12 years bring.
Speaker 2:right it's going to be a great ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you so much, adam. Thanks for being on Third Growth Option Podcast.
Speaker 2:You bet.
Speaker 1:And I will put the website, your website, into the show notes so folks can check it out. Well, we can just say it here it's SodaPupcom, right.
Speaker 2:S-O-D-A-P-U-P SodaPupcom.
Speaker 1:SodaPupcom Perfect Adam. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Benno.
Speaker 1:Take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of TGO Podcast. You can find all episodes on our podcast page at wwwrealign4resultscom. You can find me, benno, host of TGO Podcast, there as well. Just email, benno B-E-N-N-O at realign4resultscom. Let's keep growing, thank you.
