Help an Operator Out: 8-Figure Dog Brand That Needs a New Growth

**Matt Bertulli** (0:00)
Welcome back to the Operators podcast. We have a new concept we're gonna run with you today. It is called Help an Operator Out. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you hear us reference questions that we get. They come from all over the place. They're YouTube comments, the ECF community, Twitter. We're always talking about common questions that we get. So I said, well, screw it. Why don't we just bring people on to ask the questions directly? Sometimes I'm a genius. So Garrett, welcome to the show. Garrett is here. He's got a cool brand. Garrett, you're going to start off by describing the brand, or just give us a bit of a history. Then we're going to jump into questions and things that you want to talk about.
Mike and myself and Curtis are going to do our very best to not be idiots and actually help you out. Curtis, I am so talking to you. Okay?
Garrett, give us a bit of a background, man. I want to hear about this.

**Curtis** (0:59)
I have a doodle, I have a dog, Poodle.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:03)
He's a dinosaur of a dog.
I'd love to hear about the brand. How did you come up with it? Where is it?

**Curtis** (1:09)
Give us the whole thing.

**Garrett Yamasaki** (1:10)
Yeah. Everyone, my name is Garrett Yamasaki. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Matt, and posting in the ECF community. Yeah. We started We Love Doodles back in 2018
We started as a blog. We sold no e-commerce products, nothing. It was me and a computer, and my wife wanted a Golden Doodle dog. I was doing research on SEO, and I was like, man, there are two major organizations, the American Kennel Club and Continental Kennel Club, that focus on purebred dog breeds, but there was really nobody covering mutts. At the time, doodles are mutts. They're just people mixes.
And so I decided to create a blog on doodles. And you go to Domain Name Checker, and welovedoodles.com came up. It was $12, so I bought it and started blogging.
Probably within six months, I knew this would be something pretty big. At our peak, we were getting over 2 million users per month to our website. And then 2020 came around, and I was like, man, we should try to capture all the margin. We're doing really well with ads. We're doing really well with affiliates. But why don't we create our own product and essentially capture all the margin? We could see exactly what we were selling on Amazon, right? You download your Amazon affiliate report. We're selling, I don't know, 100 of somebody else's brushes per month. Why don't we just create our own and run with it? And so the e-comm side really came around starting in 2020 And we started creating products.
The first product we launched was a dog brush. And then we did over a million dollars in our first year. And I was like, okay, we probably have something here. So we started launching complimentary products to that dog brush. And here we are today, 2026 We just passed eight figures last year in revenue. So we are a very low eight figure company in the e-commerce space.

**Matt Bertulli** (3:12)
I can't believe you started a blog. So can we just start with what the hell were you thinking? So it's 2018 and you're like, I'm totally going to do a blog.
That was it. That was the best you had.

**Garrett Yamasaki** (3:25)
I was working in tech at the time.
So I had a full-time job. I didn't even quit my tech job until the end of 2021 But I was really into entrepreneurship. I knew I didn't want to essentially, I wanted to start my own company from the very beginning. So I was just dabbling. I knew blogging was a thing back in 2018 It's definitely dying now. But yeah, it came to me because I realized there was no competition. And at the time, I think I was at Google. So I did have a background in search engine.

**Matt Bertulli** (4:00)
Okay.

**Curtis** (4:01)
So you kind of like inside, like, yeah.

**Matt Bertulli** (4:03)
Okay. Your Curtis is right kind of crazy here.

**Mike Beckham** (4:06)
It's super interesting, Garrett, because it reminds me of baseball lifestyle. And I'm actually kind of curious, like because they started the same way. I think Josh talked about he posted every couple of hours for like 10 years in a row, and they built the community and then they layered on merch basically on top of that. But it's an interesting idea that you can establish whether or not you have a product market fit by first producing content, and do you have kind of like people that want that content, and then you proved it even further by validating that you could sell products to that audience, even if they weren't coming from you, and then the last step was actually like adding the product layer. Anyway, it's super interesting. I would not be surprised if that's not more of the model that you see going forward, because producing content is like the lowest risk thing you can do. It's just your time. You don't have to deal with supply chains and POs and the capital and stuff like that. So super smart way to start a business.