The Big Bark Dog Podcast with CuPooch

Podcast Transcript:

It's a ball thrower that was designed from half-hurley and a thrower at the end. I am a dog owner of 40-odd years and I have boxer dogs, I always had boxer dogs who are a fairly lively, robust type of animal. A couple of years back, I had been looking at what was needed for dog owners when they were out and about with dogs.

I founded a company called CuPooch, which is 'Cu' as in the Gaelic word for hound, and Pooch, which is the American word for dog, so 'hound dog'. It could be translated as a hound dog. CuPooch has looked at the whole idea of what you need when you're out and about with your dog.

And  I've identified things like 'four legs to the stool': One is about exercise and play, two is about Hygiene and public sanitation when you're out with your dog. Three is about safer walking when you're out with your dog, and four is about control.

So at this point, the company has launched two of the four products in two of those areas. And in the new year, we'll launch two other products for safer walking and control. So in the area of play and exercise, when I was younger, I played a lot of hurling and very often would bring my whore with me with the dogs hit the ball down the beach and the dogs would run after it.

As you get older and slower, those skills usually diminish. I came up with this idea of a ball trawler that would be somewhere in the heritage of the Irish psyche, which has whorling and dogs from the Cú Chulainn legends to the Finmacúil legends always associated together.

And I designed a ball thrower that, as I said, has a mesh handle and a throwing thrower at the end of it. It has various features that other ball throwers don't have. It's it's a robust product. So we give a lifetime guarantee for the CuHurl product. If you break it, we'll fix it.

It will throw two balls at the same time. So if you have more than one dog, you can throw two balls at the same time. It's a very easy lift, to lift it. To lift the balls, you can lift two balls together without getting your hands full of slobber. You can personalize it by putting a coloured grip on it,   some people like to do that, and we can do that for you. Also, it will fold, so it will fold when you're finished playing, when the dog's had enough and you want to continue your walk, you can fold it and put it in a bag.

These are the primary features of the Ball thower and we consider it sustainable insofar as it will last far longer than the plastic tours that are out there. It's our hero product at the moment. And we're featuring it on our website where we go to various events.

And building, slowly building a following about it. So the other area that we then have concentrated on is in the area of dog hygiene in public places. And again, there we have developed a scooper that is a foldable poop scooper that you can bring with you when you're on your walk.

We have a slogan that says:  Bag it, Bring it, Bin it. Very often people will be aware that, people who use the poo bag very often don't bring it. So they end up dumping it somewhere. So they've only done half the exercise if you just bag it and don't bring it. So we've developed a series of bags that allow you to, instead of the problem very often is that the dog does his poo at the beginning of the walk, not at the end of the walk.

So if you bag the poo, the council very often reduce the number of bins around the place because effectively their excuse is that people are using them to deposit household rubbish. So now they would expect you to walk two kilometres with a bag of poo in your hand. A lot of people just don't do it.

Let's be fair. So what we have done is created a series of bags that allow you to scoop the poo into a bag and then bring it in the bag with a separate compartment. So you can drop it in the compartment in the outer compartment until you get to a bin, or you bring it home, and then you dump it. So they are the three main projects products that we have at the moment.

We will launch a new product in the new year. We're launching it on a product platform called Indiegogo which allows you to do two things. One, to pre-sell the product and two, to validate the product in terms of seeing whether people think it's a good idea or a bad idea. And then they take it from there.

And then later in the year, we have another product coming through, which is in the pet tech area. And we're going to launch that on a similar platform. And it's primarily about teaching your dog to obey commands because most pets, most dogs, don't get the benefit of proper training.

 The product in the outline will allow you to facilitate a way of teaching your dog. Simply obey the command through voice and whistle. It then allows you to the next stage, it allows you to control your dog when it's off the lead. And finally, we're looking at developing it to a stage where it will also act as a fence around your garden.

That will keep the dog within a certain boundary. We hope to probably launch that by about mid-year. We've put a lot of resources behind that to get it to the stage that it's at the moment. That's an update of where Cool Pooch is and the type of products we're trying to bring to the market.

We're trying to bring products to the market that meet a real need. In terms of different types of products than the ones that are out there, and using 40 odd years of experience of owning and having dogs and seeing the problems that are met. In terms of what you need when you have dogs as companions all your life.

Wow, it sounds like you're doing a lot there, especially next year with the tech. New puzzles, yeah. Yeah, that sounds fascinating. And you'll have to come back and talk to us about those.

Yeah, I'm happy to do that. Be a nice platform to talk to your viewers about the products.

Yeah, again, trying to bring real products to the market. The products that I have at the moment are good, and well-engineered products. But I regard them to a certain extent as better mousetraps in so far as they're already better. They're already ball throwers out there. There are poop scoopers out there, although not many, from a walking point of view.

So, whereas the products that we intend to bring to market are, we would consider it to be very innovative and different and meeting. What we consider to be real needs, and hopefully a market, and whether there's a market and a gap, we then have to find out.

Brilliant, and just before we wrap up here, talk to me about some of the Christmas bundles that you have on your website here, so for anyone looking to get some last-minute gifts.

Yeah, what we've tried to do is to have a range of products, we've tried to package them in a way that they will appeal to people as Christmas presents for the dogs. Anybody who is a dog owner knows that the last thing you do is leave the pet out of the family circle at Christmas time.

So what we try to do is to bundle the products together in a way that allows the customer to come in and pick a price point that suits them in terms of, what their available cash is in today's cash-restricted market. That's what we've done. On the bigger products range, we have the full range.

We have what we call the CuKit, which encompasses all the products. And then we skinny that down into various bundles that people will use. In some cases, simple things like balls. We sell balls, which are an adaptation of a wall ball, which kids use to for when they're practising curling against the wall. So it's reasonably durable. But then we have what we call an ultra ball, which is effectively a leather slitter. for dogs who tend to chew. We know everything, there's nothing out there that is not chewable. But for dogs who like to chew it, it lasts longer because it's made of leather. And again, what our cohort allows you to do is a lot of people commend us on it to be able to pick the ball without having to touch it. And effectively, you can use the coo hurl when you bend the back, you can use it as a ball carrier when you're finished playing with the dog.

So again, you don't have to put your hand around it. Effectively, we've tried to say, to our customers, here are the different levels, here are the different mixes, pick one that suits you, and hopefully we will.

Brilliant. And listen, Brendan, thank you so much for joining me today and telling me all about it.

And we look forward to hearing from you in the new year as well. And a very happy Christmas to you.

Goodman, and the same to all your listeners. Have a good Christmas. You too, take care. Bye bye.

Bye bye.