Ten years before Lauri and Brent Gross ever had children, they had a cat named Bunny.
Now Patchy and Chamois roam their Auburn Township home, the latest in a series of felines the couple has taken in from shelters or rescued from the wild. And the couple has gone on to found Snuzzlo Bun, an apparel company named for what they once called Bunny while she slept.
So what in the heck are the Grosses doing making jackets for dogs?
“We are promoting world peace, beginning with love between dogs and cats,” Lauri Gross says. Actually, what the Grosses are doing is capitalizing on the growing trend of dressing dogs in outfits to match their owners.
“It’s kind of fun, and our whole image is about being fun and not taking anything too seriously,” Lauri says. “Why not wear it with your dog?”
Snuzzlo Bun introduced the dog jackets in November, and they are already selling as well, if not better, than the shirts, Brent Gross says. The dog jackets have already found a retail carrier — All About Dogs, a doggie day care, grooming and photo studio in Auburn Township — while the original shirts are still only available at www.snuzzlobun.com.
The Grosses began planning their business venture in early 2007 and launched their Web site in February 2008. They started by selling the funky men’s shirts, mainly because Brent could never find shirts he liked in department stores.
“I was picking through racks, clearance racks,” Brent says, “looking for not the normal things that customers bought. Over 10 years of searching for those kinds of shirts, as I found them, I bought them. I started having friends and relatives say, ‘That’s a neat shirt,’ so I started buying doubles and giving them away.”
Eventually, the Grosses figured there might be a market for that apparel. They pooled their respective talents — Lauri has been a freelance writer and publicist for 25 years, while Brent has worked in sales and marketing — and developed a business plan with the help of Service Corps of Retired Executives.
“They can really help with anybody’s idea,” Lauri says, “to tell you if it’s nuts or not.”
Naming the company after the family cat was Brent’s idea.
“It’s such a weird, funky name,” Lauri says. “It makes people crinkle their nose and say it a number of times.”
The Grosses financed the home-based project themselves and are the only two employees — unless you count their two children, who frequently have to lug boxes of shirts around the house.
They talked with three factories in the United States, but ultimately went with a Chinese firm. Brent says they wanted to keep the work stateside, but the high costs were too restrictive. After about a year of designing and making prototypes, the shirts were finally ready for production, and they started selling the finished goods online.
”Everything we know about the apparel business, which is not that much, has been new [for us],” Lauri says.
They now have four designs, with men’s shirts selling for $45 to $50 each and matching dog jackets for $25 to $50. The Grosses also have a catalog of 21 fabric designs available to retailers. The cloth depicting baseball photos, blue dominoes, orange bubbles and a mosaic are among the most popular.
The Grosses will attend the
MAGIC Marketplace, a fashion and apparel trade show in Las Vegas, in February. It will be their first real foray into the world of fashion trade shows, and they hope to garner some attention from retailers there.
“We’ve got to continue to work until we find the correct audience,” Brent says. “That is the phase we are in now. Once we reach that critical mass, find that niche audience, the business will be self-supporting.”
Until then, Brent is still working full time, and the company takes up most of Lauri’s time. The couple has yet to set long-range goals for Snuzzlo Bun; instead, they’re having fun and hoping the garments will catch on. Despite tough economic times since the company’s inception, Lauri says sales are about what the couple had expected. They’ve gradually built up traffic to Snuzzlo Bun’s Web site and are selling some there.
“What we need are retailers to pick up our line,” Lauri says. “If we can just hang on, we’re going in the right direction. When the economy is ready for us, we’ll be ready for it.”