Sassy Woof was created in April of 2018 by Christine Chang. Christine had two dachshunds, Maya and Winston, and a desire to create fashionable and high-quality dog harnesses and accessories. In the beginning, she spent time looking for freelance artists to help design patterns and began requesting samples from manufacturers. After settling on some designs and a manufacturer, Sassy Woof had its first launch in October of 2018.
For its first launch, Sassy Woof had six patterned collections and six rope leashes. The reception to the launch was great and encouraged Christine to move forward with more patterns and inventory. A lot of the interest in the early stages came from Maya's following on Instagram. With its second launch, Sassy Woof expanded to add more patterns and products, including the staple Dolce Rose & Wag Your Teal collections.
In the beginning, Christine was packing orders in her basement with the help of her mom and niece. Everything for Sassy Woof was done in the evenings, as she still had her full time job working in the healthcare industry. Handling product design, photography, fulfilling orders, and running the social media pages, Sassy Woof quickly became a lot of work.
Throughout 2019, Christine and her husband, Art, attended trade shows to showcase the brand and get more exposure. At all of the trade shows, people were excited about the brand and very encouraging. What started out as a word-of-mouth operation quickly began to spread and grow. Another boost to the company came when Sassy Woof began to offer wholesale to other small businesses and retailers.
In August of 2019, Christine left her job in healthcare and began working for Sassy Woof full time. In early 2020 when the pandemic hit, Sassy Woof began to see a huge increase in orders as more and more people were adopting dogs. They hired their first employee in March of 2020 (me!) to assist with wholesale operations, fulfillment, and more.
In June of 2020, as the pandemic continued, we moved into our first office in Sterling, Virginia. It was exciting to finally move from the basement into an office space! All of our content was now being shot in the new office space along with our inventory, fulfillment, and day to day operations.
The Sassy Woof team then grew from a team of three in the office every day to a team of seven over the next year! We expanded our graphic design and social media team along with our operations team as the orders continued to come in. We quickly began to outgrow our first office space as we continued to add more inventory and collections to choose from! We outgrew our first office and moved into our second office in 2021.
Also in 2021, we had our second launch in PetSmart stores! This was huge for our team to now have eight collections available to buy in PetSmart. It encouraged us to keep designing and striving to expand even more. Seeing so many new pups get introduced to our brand gave us the opportunity to welcome many more loyal pupstomers!
Another part of our business that began to grow was our wholesale operations. Today, over 875 small businesses around the world carry Sassy Woof products. We continued to branch out onto other platforms such as Chewy, PetSmart.com, and PETCO.com. We have also been featured on Zulily.com and Good Morning America!
In 2022, we moved into our third office space! We now have over 20 employees in our current office space with a marketing and social team, operations team, photographers, vendor relations, and more! We also have over 40 collections, 80 rope leash colors, and are constantly launching new products. We are so happy to see where Sassy Woof has gone and how it continues to expand.
We will be having our third PetSmart launch on July 18. Sassy Woof can be found in over 1,300 PetSmart stores around the United States and Canada. Additionally, we have a following of over 250,000 on social media where people share their pup's adventures in Sassy Woof with us. We are excited to see how our company continues to grow!
Our company could definitely not be what it is today without all of the support that we have received from YOU! I am so thankful for all of my hardworking coworkers and ambassadors who are passionate about this brand and our mission. We have some more big things coming up and are so excited to continue to share on this journey what else is to come!
