Kelly Costello, once a guest on "Shark Tank" for her business PuppyCake, discusses with us the difference between having a good product and a good business.
Danny:
All right so let's jump into today's episode. I have Kelly Costello who is the owner and founder of PuppyCake. Kelly?

Kelly:
Hi, I'm so happy to be here. I love talking about business, love talking about manufacturing so happy to share some of my stories with you.

Danny:
Well I'm excited to jump into this. So, all right, like we were talking about a little bit before we kind of kicked off is that, you know, there's a lot, like your business, well first of all, you know, it's kind of a little bit of a different area than we might typically have on IndustrialSage, which typically we're talking to a lot of B2B manufacturers, or, so it could be manufacturers, or material handling, and so you guys are a little different, but like a good different. I'm excited about it because you guys have a very interesting fascinating story that I want to dive into. So, before we get into all of that, if you just tell me from a high level, like okay PuppyCake, what do you guys do?

Kelly:
So PuppyCake makes, manufacturers, and sells cake mix and ice cream mix for dogs.

Danny:
All right.

Kelly:
We sell a ton on Amazon and a lot of our business is actually business-to-business, we sell to a lot of independent pet stores and a couple of larger stores as well.

Danny:
Okay, that's awesome. So, I really want to get into your story, I'm super excited. So I don't mean to, there was like, Shark Tank's involved with this and we're talking about how the business has been around since, you know, before the Great Recession and that was all fun and all kinds of things in-between then there. So, tell me, take me back to the beginning. Why, you know, how did PuppyCake start?

Kelly:
So I used to work for a sales and marketing firm and one of my clients was Pillsbury.

Danny:
Okay.

Kelly:
And so I was looking at their old cake mix ads and I thought, oh wouldn't that be great if they made that for dogs and then I thought, I could do that. So I started researching it, there wasn't anything on the market for it and I created some recipes, did a bunch of testing, and after a couple of months launched it. So I was 21 when I came up with the idea and then I turned 22 shortly after that and so I launched it officially on the market in November of 2007. So we got started, I was bright-eyed, young and bushy-tailed and thought that having come from the consumer packaged good background with working for larger companies like Pillsbury and Smucker's I really ambitiously thought that I would be pacing to a million dollars by the end of my first year and I was so wrong.
One of the biggest challenges that I faced is after I launched it the recession started to hit and after the bailout banks weren't lending money anymore so even at 22 the amount of credit that was extended to me was kind of unreal, today it's not happening. But I had like one line of credit that was like $15,000 and I had a $7800 balance on it. After the recession they reduced my line of credit to only $8,000 so I had $200 over what I owed and essentially I had no money to be able to run my business. So I learned some really tough lessons, had to kind of restructure and focus on more grass-root sales because that's the only thing that I could afford was me making phone calls because I just had no money to grow the business.
And the first couple years were really tough, and like you mentioned, I got on Shark Tank in 2012.