We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Susanna Domosi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Susanna, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

It was my childhood dream to have a dog, but could never get one because people in my family are allergic. When I was able to get a dog of my own, I was blessed with Grizzly Bear, a 7.5lb Pomeranian. I became obsessed with finding Grizzly the healthiest food, treats, and chews to figure out how I can help him live the longest, healthiest life possible.

Delving into research, I found out that American pet food is allowed to have sick, diseased, disabled, and dead before slaughter animals in it! How crazy is that?! It’s enraging that such low quality standards exist when it comes to food for our four legged family members.

Knowing this information, I wanted to know exactly where Grizzly’s food, treats, and chews come from. This is why Furever Love Club works directly with organic or pastured farms and every bag says exactly what farm the treat came from. Our farm partners are listed on fureverloveclub.com

Through extensive research on canine nutrition, I found it’s been scientifically proven that minimally processed foods are the healthiest for dogs. This is why Furever Love Club treats and chews are single ingredient with no preservatives, chemicals or additives. The single ingredient such as beef heart, is simply dehydrated, meaning it is minimally processed.

With Furever Love Club subscription boxes, you can easily incorporate the healthiest foods into your pup’s diet every month. The boxes come with a well rounded variety of nutrients since the box comes with the categories needed for a well balanced canine diet: muscle meat, secreting organ, seafood, and single ingredient chews which have bone and cartilage. Since these are the categories needed for a well rounded canine diet, the treats are perfect for boosting your dog’s daily meals. No matter what food you’re feeding, adding Furever Love Club treats to the meal will increase the nutritional benefit.

When thinking about monthly boxes going out from Furever Love Club and the packaging this entails, I realized that it is crucial to make a positive impact not just on the life of our pups, but also on our planet. Our motto at Furever Love Club is good for our pups, good for our planet. Our packaging is 100% compostable, our mailers are made from 100% recycled content, and our farm partners utilize regenerative agricultural practices. I feel it is the responsibility of all humans to try and preserve the health of our planet and Furever Love Club is making a contribution towards this viral cause.

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

My name is Susanna Domosi, and I am from New York City. I studied finance in college but after graduating I got my first dog Grizzly. Caring for Grizzly made me realize I want to make an impact on the lives of dogs and their owners.

I had zero experience in the pet industry or e-commerce, so I invested in a course on how to build a drop-shipping store. Furever Love Club was originally a drop-shipping store selling dog accessories: leashes, collars, clothes, toys, and beds.

After a few months of running the drop-shipping store, I pressed pause on the operation as I felt I wasn’t truly making an impact on the lives of dogs and their owners. I took a deep dive into researching canine nutrition and that’s how I found out about minimally processed foods being the best for our pups.

Since American pet food has extremely low quality standards, I wanted to create treats and chews that are transparently sourced so dog owners can know the source, and trust the quality. This is why Furever Love Club works directly with organic or pastured farms that utilize regenerative agricultural practices.

Furever Love Club dog boxes make it easy to feed minimally processed, fresh foods to your pup. Our chews help scrape away plaque and tartar from your dog’s teeth, helping with dental health as well as mental stimulation.

I am most proud of the fact that Furever Love Club isn’t just helping our pups stay healthy, but our planet too. Our packaging is 100% compostable and our mailers are made from 100% recycled content.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Furever Love Club started off as a drop-shipping store. I had no clue about how to run a business, but I build the website, ran FB and IG ads. It took me 3 months to launch the store. The business was breaking even but not profitable, and I ran it for 4 months. I knew I had to provide more value to customers in order to create a truly successful business, so I had to pivot.

I took a course on canine nutrition and learned about minimally processed foods being the best for dogs, so I launched a subscription box of single ingredient, minimally processed treats and chews made my other brands. 3 months had passed since shutting down the drop-shipping operation. Subscriptions weren’t really growing (the most number of subscribers I had was 3 with this subscription box), and something inside me knew I had to launch my own products and pivot ONCE AGAIN! This product development and launch took 6 months.

Once I launched my own products/subscription box at the end of October 2021, things really took off. I had found the organic/pastured and sustainability niche but it took me over a year and a half, plus two pivots to find what really works. Of course in the end it was about connecting to what really matters to me (transparent sourcing & sustainability) and being authentic to myself, but without the market understanding plus trial & failure, I wouldn’t have found what does works.

At the heart of it, building a business is about serving customers and it takes trial & error (pivoting) to find how to best serve people!

How did you build your audience on social media?

Just like any skill, you have to work at social media. Your first post is not going to get millions of views and bring you millions in sales (but hey, it actually might, and that’s why you just never know what’s going to do well on social media, so you might as well keep posting and trying!).

If you don’t know what to post, connect with the mission of your company and the problem you’re solving for customers to come up with content ideas.

You need to commit to a posting schedule and post regularly in order to build an audience. When you’re starting at 0, it is important to not be embarrassed about posting, doing something ‘wrong,’ or thinking your content quality is not good enough. Just keep going! It’s never going to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be. More than anything, people want to see authenticity.

At the start it’s going to feel like shouting into a black hole and nobody is paying attention. You need to go to other people’s accounts and engage with them (like, comment, start a conversation) because at the end of the day, social media is about community.

Look at accounts about how to build on social media. You will learn a lot from consuming content that social media coaches/strategist create.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fureverloveclub.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fureverloveclub/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fureverloveclub
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannadomosi/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@fureverloveclub