We were lucky to catch up with David Crane recently and have shared our conversation below.
David, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
I came up with the name for my company based on the first dog treat recipe I formulated. Our crunchy peanut butter treats are made with the spent brewing grain used during the brewing process for making beer, hence Doggie Beer Bones! Our grain-free, soft-baked treats contain no spent brewing grains, so I formulated that recipe with nutritional brewer’s yeast to keep it in the “beer” family.
David, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is David Crane, and I am the owner of Doggie Beer Bones. I started Doggie Beer Bones while I was working my “day job” as an IT Systems Analyst at Qualcomm in San Diego in 2010. Back then, craft beer was starting to hit its stride in San Diego and I had already been brewing my own beer at home for a few years. One thing I was always thinking about was how to reuse my spent grain from a brew day. So, I would google the different uses and would often try to make things like bread or pizza dough with it. Back then, making dog treats with the spent grain as the main ingredient wasn’t really being done, so I found a simple peanut butter dog treat recipe on a brewing forum and made a bunch as gifts for the holidays. The response was overwhelmingly positive, along the lines of “my dog loves these”, “You should sell these” and all the encouraging words to start a business. So, I hastily googled “how to start a business” and started pumping out 90 (yes 9-0) treats at a time out of my oven at home!
Reusing spent grain in the brewing industry is a very common practice. Breweries typically have farmers come pick up bins of the stuff after a brew day to feed their livestock. This really helps farmers cut their feed costs down and diversify the diet for their livestock, as spent grain is nutrient-rich. So, we – in our own very small way – helped breweries get rid of this byproduct and turn it into nutritious dog treats. This sets us apart from many dog treat companies, in that this ingredient alone is not all that common in dog treats. In addition to our wholesale and private label offerings, our retail customers can purchase directly from us on our website where we currently offer our products à la carte, bundled, or a monthly and bi-monthly subscription service where customers can get up to 30% off and free shipping with orders over $40.
Did your side hustle turn into your main/full time business or career? If so, please tell us the story of how you got started with this side-hustle and how it scaled up to where it is today? What were some of the key milestones?
It absolutely did! Many key milestones to turning Doggie Beer Bones from a hobby into my new career were external to me in that they were more like opportunities that I felt I needed to explore. One key opportunity came in 2017 when a private label dog treat company approached us wanting to have a CBD infused dog treat made for their upcoming new product. We were able to accommodate their needs and subsequently generated over $250K in revenue over about a year while working with this customer. This also pivoted my company’s trajectory and put us on the path to start our own line of CBD products. Fast forward to today and we’re about to launch our latest collaboration with the band Sublime and a new line of bacon flavored, grain-free, soft-baked treats called Lou Dog CBD Bites to honor the memory of their late frontman, Bradley Nowell and his best friend, Lou Dog. We are beyond excited for this one – stay tuned for our mid-October product launch!
Other milestones scattered throughout the last 12 years have come through learning about running a business that sells consumer packaged goods. Things like maintaining healthy gross profit margins, keeping our costs of goods low but not sacrificing with cheap filler ingredients, knowing our numbers i.e. operating expenses to run the business, and staying informed in the pet food industry to keep relevant.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
We do sell our products on DoggieBeerBones.com, however since we offer a line of CBD-infused treats and peanut butters we have had to forgo traditional advertising through Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram ads because they do not allow those products at this time (hopefully that will change in the very near future)!
To address this, we keep our website’s SEO up to date so we stay relevant to maintain consistent organic search traffic. We are also currently exploring publishing banner ads on pet-related blogs to generate additional traffic. In the past, we have sold our non-CBD products on Amazon but had to stop last year since the fees canceled out any income we generated. The same thing happened to us with Chewy. We are currently on Faire.com for our wholesale customers – that seems to be working well at this point.
We also sell in some brick and mortar shops but tend to stay away from pet stores. We find the competition for shelf space to be so daunting that we would rather try alternative outlets like dog-friendly breweries, tasting rooms, and coffee shops.
Our other “platform” has been to work with private labels to make dog treats for their brand. Our #1 customer in that space has been Stone Brewing Co. We make their Stone Bones, and they sell them in all of their breweries, dog-friendly tasting rooms, and gift shops. We have also made private label dog treats for Honest Paws, Second Chance Brewing Co., and Culture Brewing Co. This is a great option for dog-friendly businesses (especially breweries) that want to expand their customer offerings with a turn-key product that’s ready to sell right out of the box, while also showcasing their sustainability through up-cycling spent grain.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://doggiebeerbones.com
- Instagram: doggiebeerbones
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoggieBeerBones/
- Twitter: doggiebeerbones
Image Credits
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