Thanks to all of you for your response to our contest and your wonderful name suggestions. We received 64 name suggestions, but only a handful of votes. I had a tough time deciding, so I left it up to my tag designer to choose.
This photo is not our Mulligan....but it sure looks a lot like her! I received the photo last year from Jennifer. This is Sammy.
Do you have a photo of your dog with pumpkins? If you do...please email it to me! Maybe we'll use it on our new & improved pumpkin biscuits. If you don't have a photo, what are you waiting for? Get creative! (remember, we change the photos to black & white to use on our tags and we need a minimum of 300 dpi)
A very dear friend of mine has a dog battling bone cancer. Molly can no longer eat any grains. I have been experimenting with a couple of recipes and have decided to bring back our pumpkin biscuits. (our friend & customer Erin will be happy to hear this....she was so disappointed when I dropped pumpkin from our biscuit line)
I've modified our previous recipe and have eliminated the oats. The new recipe is currently being tested and if all goes well it will be hitting the shelves in October. The new list of ingredients in our pumpkin biscuits will be: pumpkin, brown rice flour, unsalted sunflower seeds, water, egg, corn oil, baking soda, and allspice.
Pumpkin and allspice are very good for the digestive system. These biscuits are packed with healthy goodness and boy do they smell good!
Meet Carling. (photo by Barbara Lapointe) Carling's photo has been featured on our Say Cheese package for the past 9 months (we have others as well). But I used the last one today! So Carling's photo is officially retired. I picked Carling's photo to use on "Say Cheese" because I thought the look on his face was hilarious...it's like he's saying..."Just take the picture!" Or one of those looks that teenagers get when they're determined not to have a good time.
I did my first "Photo Search" last summer and printed the first batch of tags in September 2006. I wanted to feature as many different dogs as I could to make it fun for my customers. My idea was to print a limited run of each photo....only about 300 of each. However 2 things defeated my plan.
First of all, the printer ran 1000 of each photo by mistake. That's not so bad when you're talking about only one photo. But my first print run had 21 photos....that meant that 21,000 tags were printed instead of 6,300 tags. Yikes!
Second of all, the contact I had for 8 years at the printing company I use left. The new person told me that tags would be four times (that's 4 x!!) the cost that I had been originally quoted if I wanted only small batches printed. Double yikes!
So, the end result was that I can't feature as many dogs as I want and print a lot more tags of each photo I use. Some day maybe I'll find a way to print the tags inexpensively so that I can do small runs.
Some exciting news! Last week has been busy with four new stores being added to my retail stores list. (well, the stores aren't new but they're new to my biscuits). Here are the new locations:
Urban Paws in Kingston
Winstead All About Dogs in Bloomfield
Ornament Express in Vaughn and
Small Wonders Pet Emporium in Toronto
If you're in the area, please go to one of the stores and buy some biscuits. Tell them you read about it on the blog!
I just kicked our cat Phantom out of our bed...again...he just loves driving me crazy and crawling under the covers during the day.
Anyway, dealing with him reminded me that another post was due about our cat photo search.
We're looking for a unique & fun cat photo to go on a tag for a new product I'm developing. In my previous post, I had said the deadline was May 31st...but I'm changing it! We need your photos to come in a little sooner than that. New deadline is April 30th so get those cameras going!
Unlike our dog photo search (we've printed over 30 of your photos on our tags), we're going to pick just one lucky cat photo. Our new cat product will of course be all natural and handmade...just like our dog biscuits. So far, it looks like we're going to use only 2 ingredients...both organic.
Looking for cool cats!
This is our cat Phantom. You can't tell, but he's on our couch beside our Giant Schnauzer Cinder. (Cinder is very black and tends to blend into the black couch). The two of them (and our other dog Mulligan) are buds even though the dogs tend to chase Phantom around sometimes.
Why am I talking about our cat? It's cuz we're looking for your cat photos. Yes, cat photos! A dog biscuit company looking for cat photos? I wonder what we're up to. You'll just have to wait and find out.
Here's what we need: 1. Photo of your cat in high resolution (300 dpi or more). 2. Preferably a photo of a "happy" or "frisky" cat. 3. We can't use a photo with "green eye", so set your camera on red eye reduction mode. That's it! If your photo makes our top ten, I'll send you an email to ask you to sign a release form. End date for our search is April 30, 2007.
These are some of the photos we featured on the first print run of our new look late last year. Now that I have a blog, I'll be posting the featured photos every once in a while with a blurb about the pictures. I have such fun going through all the photos, the only problem is I can't choose all of them! (cause I love dogs of EVERY shape and size). My original idea was to have very small print runs of each tag, so that I could change my tags frequently. However, that plan didn't work out! (too big a price tag for this little company). But, I'll be printing 12 more photos shortly, so all in all I'll have over 30 different tags in circulation for a while. Hope you enjoy them! (coming soon)
We received some great photos from Natalie Heath recently in our ongoing search for new photos to use on our Barking Biscuit tags. Check out Natalie's web site at www.heathphoto.ca
Remember, we need your photos this week in order to consider them for our next print run of Barking Biscuit tags.
We'll be printing some new tags for our biscuits in the near future. If you want to see your dog's photo on Barking Biscuits, send in your photo in the next week. We need small dogs, big dogs, action dogs, cute dogs, ugly dogs, any kind of dogs! We love all dogs and want to feature as many different dogs as we can. Check out details at this link: www.barkingbiscuit.com/photos.html
