686: Claire Built The World's #1 Dachshund Brand From Home - Now Doing $140K/Month

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Foundr. At Foundr, our mission is to support the next generation of Ecom founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own Foundr community. The entrepreneurs who are in the trenches taking action, learning and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time. This podcast is proudly produced by the Foundr team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

**Leah Finch** (1:54)
Welcome to the Foundr Little Empires Podcast. I'm your host, Leah Finch. Today's guest is Claire Wolfson. She is the co-founder and CEO of Bean Goods, the world's number one Dashend themed apparel and lifestyle brand. This actually began as a passion project inspired by her beloved Dashend, has now grown into a seven-figure business generating around $140,000 a month. She's got a very loyal community, as you can imagine, of dog lovers around the world. And I am very excited to bring Claire's story to our founder community. So Claire, welcome to the podcast.

**Claire Wolfson** (2:34)
Thank you, Leah. Excited to be here.

**Leah Finch** (2:37)
Awesome. Now, I want to hear all about Bean Goods. I know you have rapidly grown this brand and it's been around for some time as well. So if we can go back to day one, before you even started, like tell us a bit about your career and your background. Like did you have any experience in e-commerce?

**Claire Wolfson** (2:55)
I actually would say that we haven't really rapidly grown. There were a few years of big time rapid growth, but we've kind of like slowly but surely have been building the brand all the way back from 2011 It's kind of like when the design and the concept sort of sparked initially.
Yeah, my background is in apparel design. I went to school for apparel design in Portland, Oregon, and my husband's background is in graphic design.
It's a really good pair for a apparel and accessories dog brand. But our background before starting Bean Goods, we both went to school for me, apparel design, him, graphic design. But then after that, I had several internships, and I only managed to have one corporate design job at a sportswear brand in Portland. And I worked there full-time for about two years, and then kind of quickly realized that corporate sort of design life and just living a nine-to-five type of job just was really, you know, being in fuzzy cubicle walls just wasn't sparking any joy for me. And my husband, he worked at like Budweiser and then freelancing. He actually worked for a pet brand, coincidentally designing like some of their toys and a lot of their packaging, that kind of stuff. So that's kind of our background before diving full on into e-commerce and entrepreneur founder life.

**Leah Finch** (4:48)
Okay.
And so 2011 Tell us about what inspired this brand, obviously out of your own love for your dog, but tell us a bit more about it.

**Claire Wolfson** (4:59)
Yeah, totally. So I came to the relationship with Chris with Bean. My original dachshund, I got him when I was 20 years old. He was like my first dog of my own. And I was just so obsessed with this little guy. I didn't grow up with wiener dogs. I just decided that that's the dog that I wanted. And he was just the best, the funniest little dude. Actually what originally sparked the idea to start a brand, like inspired by him and my obsession with wiener dogs was he had a really bad injury that's super common in sausage dogs called IVDD. And they basically become paralyzed by this like disc disease in their backs. And so that was really scary and devastated to just see him like go through this horrific injury and just be so helpless. And so we originally wanted to design something that supported dachshund's backs, like a special harness to sort of support this very common injury in dachshunds.