It’s no secret people treat their dogs and cats like children, expressing love for those four-legged roommates through the touchpoints of everyday life. And yet, the pet grooming space has been rife with products that are hardly joyful – many are stress-inducing for animals and humans, just plain blah, or both.

Operating as a young startup committed to differentiation, entrepreneur Caroline Fu wanted to shake up the status quo. So she asked Otherness to help realize her vision for Flydog: a better way to care for humankind’s best friend (her stinky Golden Retriever included).

The project’s objective was to create a strong D2C brand that would prove cohesive and conversion-ready on ecommerce sites, including pet industry-specific retailers, such as Chewy. It needed to launch with confidence in a premium-priced category appealing to millennial consumers while also ambitiously driving category innovation.

The brand identity we developed for Flydog hinges on clear-eyed positioning: pet grooming products should make it easier for people to be the good, ever-doting guardians they want to be.

As a repeat customer of the studio, this entrepreneur knew she could lean on us to conduct research wide and deep, particularly into a discerning North American audience. And we discovered: the category disruption didn’t have to arrive in a big bang.

Flydog came to express itself as a daisy chain of small, pet-centric innovations designed in celebration of interspecies relationships and the belief that every dimension of domesticity deserves elevation.

For the enjoyment of their ultimate end users, the product formulations consist of pure ingredients that smell, taste, and feel good. Think: chicken and peanut butter flavours and no-rinse-necessary foams.

And for their humans, we leveraged our years of design experience in the boutique skincare space as well as living with our own in-house mixed-breed pup. The bottle pumps themselves had to be ergonomic – compressible with that one free hand. Line extensibility was also crucial because the brand needed to grow with integrity across items.