We Wagging Tails launched on August 12, 2025. Today is March 28, 2026. That is seven and a half months, thirty-seven blog posts, two dogs, one newborn daughter who came home eleven days ago, and more decisions than I can count — about products, about standards, about what kind of brand we are trying to build and why.
I have been thinking about writing this post since before we launched. Not because I had something specific to say, but because I knew that at some point I would need to explain the choice we made to do this the way we are doing it — openly, with our names on it, with our dogs and our family and our actual opinions visible to anyone who wants to look. That choice is not the default in e-commerce. Most brands are faceless by design. We chose not to be, and I want to explain why.
The Problem With Faceless Brands
The pet product market is enormous and largely anonymous. Most of what is sold in it comes from brands that have no face, no story, no person behind them who has actually used the products on an actual dog. The products are sourced from suppliers, photographed well, listed with marketing copy, and sold to people who have no way of knowing whether any of it is true.
I know this because I spent years buying from those brands. I bought harnesses that chafed Shadow within minutes of wearing them. I bought beds marketed as orthopedic that compressed flat under Dexter's weight within months. I bought leashes with clips that failed. I bought toys marketed as indestructible that lasted four days. In every case, the product looked fine in the photos and the copy said the right things and there was no way to know, before buying, that it was not going to work.
That experience is what We Wagging Tails is a response to. Not just the bad products — bad products exist in every category — but the anonymity that makes them possible. When nobody's name is on a product, nobody is accountable for whether it works. When there is no face behind a brand, there is no one to trust or distrust. The transaction is purely transactional, and the customer has no information beyond what the marketing provides.
I wanted to build something different. Something where the accountability is visible, where the testing is real, where the person making the product decisions has skin in the game in the most literal sense — because the products are going on their own dogs, every day, and the consequences of a bad decision are immediate and personal.
What Building in Public Actually Means
Building in public does not mean sharing everything. It means sharing the things that are relevant to the people who are buying from us — the decisions, the standards, the reasoning, the failures as well as the successes.
It means writing thirty-seven blog posts over seven months that explain not just what we sell but why we sell it, how we test it, what we have learned from Shadow and Dexter about what dogs actually need, and what our family looks like as we build this alongside everything else that is happening in our lives. It means putting our names on the posts. It means writing about the harness that failed Shadow and the leash clip that gave way and the bed that compressed flat, because those failures are the reason the standard exists.
It means being honest about what we do not carry and why. There are categories of products I have not entered because I have not found products in those categories that meet the standard. I would rather have a smaller catalog that I believe in completely than a larger one that includes things I am uncertain about. That is a business decision with real costs, and I have made it deliberately.
It means being honest about the growth. We Wagging Tails is seven and a half months old. It is not a large brand. It is a brand that is building carefully, on a foundation of real testing and real standards, with the intention of being around for a long time. I am not trying to grow as fast as possible. I am trying to grow in a way that does not require compromising the thing that makes the brand worth building.
Why the Family Is Part of It
Some people have asked, in various ways, why we include so much personal content — why Carrie writes about the walks and the rainy days and the morning routine, why I write about Shadow's anxiety and Dexter's destroyed toys and what it cost me to figure out that cheap gear is not cheap. Why our daughter's arrival is part of the story of a pet brand.
The answer is that the family is not separate from the brand. The brand exists because of the family — because Shadow and Dexter are our dogs, because their needs shaped our standards, because the years of figuring out what actually works for them are the foundation of every product decision we make. Separating the brand from the family would mean separating it from the thing that makes it credible.
It would also mean building something I am less interested in building. I am not interested in building a faceless brand that happens to sell good products. I am interested in building something that people can trust because they know who is behind it — what we care about, how we think, what we have learned, what we are willing to say publicly about the products we carry and the ones we do not.
Our daughter is eleven days old. She will grow up knowing that her parents built something with their names on it, that they were honest about what they knew and what they did not, that they chose accountability over anonymity because they believed it was the right way to do business. That is a thing worth building for her to see.
What the Past Seven Months Have Taught Me
Building a brand while managing two dogs, running a household, and preparing for a baby is not a small undertaking. There have been weeks when the blog posts were the last thing I had energy for and the first thing I made myself do anyway, because consistency is the only thing that builds trust over time and trust is the only thing that makes a brand like this worth anything.
I have learned that the standard is the easy part. Holding the standard — saying no to products that do not meet it, accepting the slower growth that comes from a smaller catalog, resisting the temptation to add things just because they would sell — is harder. Not because the standard is unclear, but because the pressure to compromise it is constant and comes from reasonable-sounding places. More products means more revenue. More revenue means more stability. More stability means more time to do the things that matter.
The counter-argument, which I have made to myself many times, is that the standard is the stability. A brand that compromises its standard for short-term growth is a brand that has traded the thing that makes it worth trusting for the thing that makes it look like every other brand in the market. I have not been willing to make that trade. I do not intend to.
I have also learned that building in public is harder than building in private, and more valuable. Harder because every post is a commitment — to a position, to a standard, to a version of the brand that is now on record and cannot be quietly walked back. More valuable because those commitments are exactly what makes the brand trustworthy. A brand that has said, publicly and repeatedly, what it stands for and why, is a brand that has something to lose by not living up to it. That accountability is the point.
What Comes Next
Our daughter is eleven days old. The store is seven and a half months old. Shadow is six and a half. Dexter is six. Carrie and I have been building this together since before we launched, and we will keep building it together in the months and years ahead.
The catalog will grow, carefully. The standard will not change. The posts will keep coming — from me, from Carrie, from both of us together when the moment calls for it. The dogs will keep being the test. The family will keep being the reason.
I do not know exactly what We Wagging Tails will look like in two years or five. I know what it will be built on: real testing, honest standards, and the names of the people who made the decisions. That is enough to build from. It has been enough so far.
Thank you for being here for the first seven and a half months. We are just getting started.