Tell us about The Delray Dog Company. What types of products do you offer? What makes your products stand out in the marketplace? Delray Dog Company is a nutrition-first pet products company that sells both direct to consumers online and as a wholesaler to retail stores. Our inaugural dog treat is Waves, a 100 percent dehydrated protein jerky with a fruit topper.
The marketplace is full of dog treats with additives, salts and other fillers that reduce nutrition and health outcomes for customers’ pets. Waves have only two ingredients: protein and a fruit topper—both sourced in the U.S.
We don’t believe companies should market high-protein pet treats, and then only deliver on a small portion of meat. That’s why we work with our manufacturing partners to deliver on our promise of 100 percent single-protein treats across three meats: beef, chicken and turkey. As we continue to grow, we plan to expand our offerings to additional high-protein pet treats, including chicken chips and healthy supplements.
The Delray Dog Company’s treats combine 100 percent U.S.-sourced meats with health-promoting fruits like blueberries, pumpkin and cranberries. Why is this important? It’s not enough for pet treats to only focus on the protein. Though it’s important to have U.S.-sourced and 100 percent single-protein treats, adding fruit is a critical component of ensuring health outcomes for our customers’ dogs.
Blueberries are critical, as they promote antioxidant health and immune support in dogs, which reduces the risk of cancer. They can also improve bone strength by adding vitamin K, which enhances density—particularly for older dogs.
Pumpkin is rarer on the market, but very important for allowing dogs to have top-notch digestion through its natural fiber content. In addition, pumpkin contains prebiotic that helps dogs’ intestines process food effectively and smoothly.
Finally, cranberries are high in vitamin C and potassium, both of which help lower the chances that dogs will develop heart disease. Moreover, cranberries are very effective at helping control urinary tract infections in dogs—and even stop them from occurring in the first place, through their antioxidant features.
Before you started The Delray Dog Company, you previously built another successful nutrition-first pet treat business. How did that past experience inform your approach this time around? We learned that having reliable and transparent partners is absolutely critical. When you are selling consumable goods to pets and hoping to drive health outcomes, it is very important to be clear with partners about expectations for ingredients and manufacturing. For example, we are adamant that our partners use only U.S.-sourced ingredients, even down to the oxygen absorbers in our bags. This allows us to ensure quality and trace the origins of our products. We openly share this information with customers in our media, so they can understand what enters their dogs’ bodies.
What is The Delray Dog Company’s channel strategy? What role do independent pet stores play in that strategy? Delray Dog Company operates entirely through its website (www.delraydog.co) and sells directly to consumers and retail stores. As an e-commerce company, we rely heavily on social media, but our goal is to broaden the conventional channels used for sales. Of course, we use Instagram and Facebook to connect directly with customers and showcase our products. However, unlike many pet treat companies, we plan to expand into TikTok and feature our customers and their pets in creative branding that explains how our products benefit dogs.
We also care deeply about maintaining close and personal relationships with our customers and want to meet them where they live—through their mobile devices. That’s why we have partnered with a text message company to have a direct line available to customers to write in, ask questions, and share photos of their dogs. It’s more important than ever to establish lasting, consistent and constant relationships with customers in a health-based marketplace, so we hope to achieve this by text messaging. Not only does this allow direct access to customers and their pets for customer service, it also offers the opportunity to get our products in front of real people instead of stuck in email inboxes.
Independent pet stores are also a significant part of our channel strategy. We have found that independent pet stores are able to establish the types of close customer relationships that companies like ours need to sell healthy pet products. Pet owners who shop independents—as opposed to bigger-box stores—tend to approach their pets’ health in a very hands-on way. We love this, as independent storeowners get to know pet owners and care about their dogs and cats as if they were their own. Building off these relationships and gaining trust with consumers is an excellent entry point for an emerging company with a focus on health, particularly as it can require a bit more detail when selling treats with a holistic focus.
The Delray Dog Company sells direct to retailers, forgoing distributors. Why did you decide on this approach? Selling directly to retailers is a key part of our strategy. When a company works with a distributor, they lose the direct, personal relationship with storeowners and retail buyers. This can be very costly if retail shops and their employees don’t fully understand the health benefits of our products. By selling directly to retailers, we can provide unfettered and unfiltered information and access on-demand without needing to go through a distributor.
Furthermore, adding an intermediary like a distributor increases the distance between Delray Dog Company and real people and their dogs or felines. We want to have as much direct contact with customers as we can to develop trusting relationships and drive awareness of the fact that pet treats aren’t only a reward, but also a key opportunity for owners to drive health outcomes for their pets. By working directly with retail stores, we are able to hear feedback and questions from customers without any drop-off points. With distributors, there is no guarantee you will receive this sort of critical information, which makes it harder to explain our products and act on customer concerns.
Your focus is a holistic, nutrition-based approach to pet wellness. What attracted you to this approach? What are the key elements of holistic pet care that have shaped your treats? The holistic approach is, at its core, a balanced approach that considers food as a key driver of health outcomes for pets. Instead of diagnosing issues and only offering medicine as a solution, the holistic approach attempts to prevent health situations before they start by identifying simple and effective ingredients that promote health. Holistic has influenced our Waves treats in a couple of key ways:
(1) We do not have any additives or salt in our treats, as we know that these items tend to cause the very issues that dogs need to avoid, otherwise they could end up at the vets office reliant on medicine and treatment, and;
(2) We have identified three fruit toppers that have significant health benefits that dogs don’t get enough of in traditional foods—cranberries, blueberries and pumpkins. On the latter point, many pet owners don’t even know their dogs can eat these fruits, so we integrate them as fruit toppers into our treats to encourage health, but also make them super easy for owners to get into their dogs bodies in the form of treats.
In addition to offering high-quality products, how does The Delray Dog Company help drive sales in pet stores? What types of sales and marketing support do you offer? Delray Dog Company is currently expanding its offerings in this respect. We hope to work directly with retail stores to feature their customers and storefronts on our social media.
Our goal is to showcase dogs and their owners who have been successful with our products purchased at retail stores. We want to drive business back to our retail partners as our shared success relies on it. Part of this is educating retail store owners on new channel strategies that are less common in the space like TikTok where people love to see dogs and their owners finding creative uses for pet products that can become trends.
What does the future hold for The Delray Dog Company? What are your short- and long-term goals for the brand? In the short-term, Delray Dog Company wants to get our Waves treat into the mouths of as many dogs as possible because we have seen how much they love them. As we continue to build our customer list, this will be the most effective way to build brand awareness and educate customers about the powers of simple protein and fruit for their pets.
In the long-term, Delray Dog Company would like to expand its offerings beyond pet treats, while sticking to our philosophy of simple, transparent and effective ingredients. This could include shampoos, more pet treats, and even wet foods. PB