This premium dog brand is in no hurry to be carried by pet retailers

The co-founders of Lil Luv Dog both worked in the prestige beauty industry: Cara Santana Leto as the founder of The Glam App and Stephanie Suganami as the COO of Kardashian West Brands. So when the longtime friends and dog lovers decided to start a line of dog-grooming products, Lil Luv Dog, it would be understating it to say they took a page from beauty brands.

They took the whole book.

The brand is “taking the trends that are prevailing in the beauty industry and applying them to the [dog] grooming business,” Santana Leto told Retail Brew.

Last August, the brand launched with dry shampoo, which retails for $36 for 1.41 ounces, and has since added pet wipes ($24 for 80 wipes).

Santana Leto said Lil Luv Dog is “clean beauty for dogs,” referring to the trend for safer seeming ingredients and transparency by cosmetics brands.

The New York Times put it this way in the headline for a feature on the company last November: “Like Goop, but for Dogs.”

Five months later, as if the Gray Lady had manifested it, the brand announced it had landed distribution through Goop. But far from being a fluke, ending up on a website that is synonymous with clean beauty had been the brand’s retail strategy from the beginning.

The brand recently partnered with 4AM Skin to mail the beauty brand’s wipes, Clean Sheets, along with the dog brand’s wipes to 250 influencers, with copy that read, “When their 4AM is as messy as yours.”

Lil Luv Dog also recently debuted at the East Hampton location of luxury beauty retailer Violet Grey—a novelty for the retailer, which carries no other pet products or brands on its website.

Prestige beauty brands also are dabbling with dachshunds:

• Aesop, Malin+Goetz, Ouai, and Kiehl’s all have introduced dog shampoos.
• Dolce & Gabbana and DedCool both market fragrances for pets.

Beauty and the beast: The brand is marking territory, to put it in its end users terms. Its revenue is growing about 7.5x month over month and will round out its first year in August with more than $1.5 million in revenue, per Santana Leto.

With about 85% of its business direct-to-consumer, Lil Luv Dog has a particularly vivid picture of its shoppers.

“Our primary cohort is women between the ages of 25 and 35,” Santana Leto said, adding that their target customer has an average annual income of about $200,000, and lives in coastal cities as well as metropolitan areas including Chicago, Dallas, and Miami.

“They’re sophisticated and savvy, and they’re the modern pet owner, and that’s commensurate with how Steph and I see ourselves,” she said.

Those consumers, like the brand’s founders, also have a predilection for upscale beauty products, and Lil Luv Dog is betting that they’ll find their consumers (and vice versa) as they’re shopping for beauty products.

“We are just meeting them where they’re at,” Santana Leto said.

Paws button: One of only two dedicated pet grooming brands that have earned the Environmental Working Group’s certification for health and safety standards, the brand is highlighting what Santana Leto called the products’ “elevated standard with efficacious ingredients.”

As a pup itself at this stage, Lil Luv Dog is betting that the best way to telegraph that standard is in the beauty channel.

“We’re built to scale—we could easily go into 900 doors at Petco, but what type of brand awareness have we created at that point?” Santana Leto said. In the Petco aisle, the brand would likely be competing with lower-priced products that “don’t have the same level of premium and prestige ingredient formulation,” she said.

“We are holding off on going into pet retailers that are exclusive pet retailers right now” but “we’ll leave that on the table as we scale,” she said. “We will go into these more sort of pet retailers, but it’s down the line—it is not a today thing.”