Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nikita Hemani. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Nikita thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

I launched Simba’s BARKery in 2017 as a home-based business. It was truly family-run where everyone from parents to my nephews helped me prepare for each weekend at the Dallas Farmer’s Market. The farmer’s market was a great step for the business; we were able to spread awareness about the business, understand our customers and the market and test out our products and improve based on feedback. Through this experience, we quickly learned that the dog treat market is saturated with thousands of options out there. We decided to pivot to celebrations – dog cakes, beer, party kits and more!

While the farmer’s market was a good distribution center, having a physical space was a lot of effort for the returns. Since we had established our brand in market, we decided to grow our digital channel. We invested in our e-commerce site, learnt all about SEO, Google Ads, content marketing and all the other buzz words you hear these days. It was all about increasing traffic to our website. Our digital presence also helped us when the pandemic hit. We were able to continue serving up delicious dog cakes during those uncertain times.

This February we celebrate 5 years of being in business. It has been an interesting journey as we navigated through finding our niche, understanding our customers, determining our sales channels and baking the most amazing dog cakes in Dallas.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The idea of Simba’s Barkery began in 2012 when I started volunteering with a local dog rescue as a foster parent. I fostered several dogs of different shape, form, and dietary restrictions. The one thing in common was their unconditional love for us. So why not give back some of this love? And the best way to a dog’s heart is through their stomach!

At Simba’s BARKery we are passionate about celebrating your pup with our delicious cakes and treats. Whether it is your dog’s birthday party, adoption, or gotcha day, we have something for every occasion. We create treats that are carefully crafted from natural and quality ingredients. The treats are baked fresh every day with human-grade ingredients. Each treat then goes through an official tasting and approval by the Barkery’s personal Labrador taster, Simba.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

When we started Simba’s BARKery, we thought about the brands that we loved most and tried to figure out what we loved about them. The common thread was great customer experience and we wanted to bring that to Simba’s BARKery. We want to go the extra mile to keep our customers happy whether that is through hassle-free returns, understanding and responding to customer needs/feedback, customizations or more! We always put the customer first.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

While Simba’s BARKery started off with some physical presence, we have primarily been an online-only business. We sell through our website and deliver across Dallas. We like this model because it cuts down on overhead costs that come with a physical store, gives us more flexibility to pivot our business to changes customer needs and allows us to address a larger customer base. It also helped us through the pandemic and the lockdown as we had the structure in place to support the new environment.

However, having an online business does not mean it is less work. The efforts are just different. Without a physical presence, you have to think about other ways to promote your business and drive traffic to your site e.g. digital marketing, search engine optimization, blogs, etc.

I believe that having an online store is key in today’s day and age. Platforms like Amazon, Etsy and others or even Shopify or Wix for your own sites make it very easy to stand-up an online store and start taking orders.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.simbasbarkery.com
• Instagram: @simbasbarkery
• Facebook: @thebarkerydfw

Image Credits
Town of Addison