2022 brought a series of ups and downs, but overall was a successful year for the business. One struggle we continued to face from 2021, was supply chain issues due to the pandemic. As a whole, our company progressed greatly and many opportunities arose. Our biggest accomplishments this year were finalizing our new packaging and selling our treats in Lunds and Byerly's.
The packaging design process took place over the course of many months, trying to find the best way for our packaging to stand out on the shelves. We looked at many different options for colors and styles of packaging, making sure it was exactly what we wanted.
For the month of May, many weekends were spent at demos in the local Lunds and Byerly’s grocery stores sharing our story and promoting our woof treats. The packaging was ready to be on shelves mid-summer and we are all very pleased with how it turned out. After being on the shelves for a few months, we dealt with supply chain issues as mentioned previously, but definitely saw a spike in sales! After we got into Lunds, we needed to change co-packers to be able to fulfill the large orders coming in which is a recent change we made.
As for the fall, we were interviewed by both KSTP and WCCO TV. It was a very cool experience to be on live television and see how everything comes together!
A couple other mentionable opportunities include selling our treats for the afternoon at Woofstock and a new local brewery Wooden Ship! Woofstock is an event in Linden Hills where people walk around with their dogs and shop for their pet.
It was fun meeting some of our customers and hearing about them recalling us selling our treats at the France 44 entryway or on the corner of the street! Hearing stories like those are a good way for us to reflect on how far our business has come in the past few years.
As well as this, we also did the Holiday market boutique at Avail academy which we hadn’t done for a few years.
We were also interviewed by a business journalist from the Star And Tribune, which will be published this month. It will be so cool to be featured in such a big newspaper and allow for so many people to read about our story. Another way we contributed to this year's profits was the Linden Hills farmers market. We enjoy selling our treats there because most of the stands sell organic products for people. It’s a good way to meet local customers and other small businesses in the area.
Considering the large goals we set and met in 2022, it has definitely helped pave success and brought along many accomplishments and improvements in the business!
