We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Adam Baker. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Adam below.

Hi Adam, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

At Sodapup, we produce 100% in the USA with strategic partners. This allows us to lower inventory levels and produce on a just in time basis. It also ensures that our materials are FDA compliant and that our products are produced in safe environments where employees are treated well.

In Corporate America there is an assumption that you have to produce in Asia to get the best pricing. But if you look at the entire supply chain including transportation and importation costs, there is not a huge advantage, particularly for injection molded products that are made with a lot of automation. If you also add in the cost of sourcing teams, product development trips to Asia, on-site QA etc… this further adds to the cost of this production model.

By producing in the USA we can easily meet with our factories to address product development, QA, and production issues. We also know that there will be no human rights abuses.

When we think about creating share-holder value, we have to look beyond just maximizing profit. We should also look at the good we are doing in the communities where we operate. We are proud of our 100% USA manufacturing and the jobs we create here at home.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The majority of my career was in the Sporting Goods industry where I served in executive roles at Nike, Under Armour and Crocs. My roles were primarily in product management and product strategy. I had the opportunity to work with some amazing entrepreneurs and wondered whether I had “the right stuff” to create my own brand. I studied the pet industry because my wife and I love dogs, and I thought there was an opportunity to create something new and different.

The opportunity I saw was to create pet products that were more than just “pet supplies.” By focusing specifically on female consumers we began to create functional dog toys, lick mats and dog bowls that were also beautiful. The goal was to create an emotional connection with consumers that was entirely unexpected so that consumers would buy not just because the product worked great for the dog, but was also irresistible for the consumer.

I am proud of several things:

First, I’m proud to see how our target consumers have adopted our products and even used them in unexpected ways. Many consumers collect our designs… which can have tremendous benefits for our retail partners. For instance, in the past consumers would buy 1 dog bowl. Now, they might buy 2-3 of our slow feeder bowls because they love the designs.

Second, Our goal was to create a pet brand that people could fall in love with… and they have! This comes largely from our product designs, but also because of the values we stand for. Our 100% USA manufacturing stance. Our giveback programs etc….

Third, I am proud that we have “moved the market.” We have watched other brands start to adopt the type of design principals and innovation that we have been pushing for the past five years. We didn’t invent dog bowls, or lick mats, or nylon chew toys, but we brought a completely different approach to these product types and we have seen other brands follow our brand – all of which gives consumers more great options to choose from.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My first “go” in the pet industry was to create a pet lifestyle brand called “Wag More Bark Less”. I licensed this slogan from the TM owner and I spent $250,000 developing a complete product line. Shortly after launching the brand, my licensor sold their company and the new owners did not want to license the slogan…. so, I had to either accept defeat or find a way to pivot.

As luck would have it, I had lunch with a friend who had just met a rubber manufacturer who “knows a lot about dog toys”. I met with that US factory owner and shortly afterward started the pivot toward my own brand, Sodapup. There have been many twists and turns along the way. For example, in 2020 I didn’t know what lick mats were. In 2024 we are a global leader in this product type!

In short, the Sodapup business today looks almost nothing like the original concept :)

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Our social media journey really took off when we started producing a product called a lick mat. This is a thin rubber mat with a texture on it. You spread soft foods into the surface and your dog licks the food off the mat. Licking has a soothing effect on dogs and the “enrichment” challenge is stimulating for the dogs brain. When we entered the lick mat category I first tried all the competing products and figured out what I did and did not like about those products. Then I set out to create a better product. One of my biggest criticisms of the competing lick mats is that they were boring – they looked like they were designed by engineers. They were visually unappealing.

Our first lick mat design was a jigsaw puzzle pattern. It was a very difficult design so dogs had to work longer and harder to get at the food. We noticed on social media that people were decorating this design by putting different colored foods in each puzzle piece….like color by numbers. None of our competitors had designs that would allow this type of decoration.

I had an epiphany. What if we lean into this and create more designs that can be decorated? What if we treat lick mats like a graphic tee shirt? What if we keep pushing out fun new graphic designs? Will people collect them? Buy more than one? Can we build our social media following by treating new product development as a marketing activity? This is what we did. We pushed out new designs every month. Consumers bought them and posted their lick mat enrichment creations on social media – and we reposted their content on our feed (@sodapupdogtoys) to celebrate them and to show everyone the beautiful creations.

This has been a fascinating journey. We create products for a specific consumer and then we watch on social media to see how they like it. We learn from the consumer response on social media and then do more designs based on what we’ve learned. In the process we’ve build an organic IG following of almost 95,000 followers. This serves as a global focus group for our new designs and it is a big community of dog enrichment enthusiasts.

In the Fall of 2024 we went a step further and created a podcast called the Sodapup Enrichment Lab. This podcast is short 30 minute episodes on dog enrichment practices. Many of our guests are the creators behind the instagram accounts that are doing amazing enrichment with our products. The goals of the podcast are threefold. First, we want to create a resource for others to learn about enrichment. Second, we want to meet the amazing creators behind these IG accounts, and; third, we want to put Sodapup in the center of the enrichment conversation. Even though the podcast is not about Sodapup products, our products tend to come and be featured in the imagery – so it is a “soft sell” that positions Sodapup as an expert and leader in the category.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sodapup.com
• Instagram: @sodapupdogtoys
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SodaPup-802193966483562/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sodapup
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrueDogsLLC
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sodapup/videos

Image Credits

Dominika Wiegel
Caroline Valkenburg