The buying policy
How we pick
Most dog shops are a search box bolted to a warehouse. Four hundred collars, no opinion, and a five-star rating on every single one. We wanted the opposite: a short list, chosen deliberately, where somebody can tell you why each thing is on it.
One per category
For every job a dog owner actually has — feeding, walking, grooming, sleeping, keeping busy on a wet Tuesday — we pick the one product worth owning and stock that. If two things are genuinely different rather than near-identical, we might carry both. Usually they are not.
The range is capped at around thirty items. It will never be four hundred. A curated shop that keeps adding stock stops being curated.
Where it comes from
We buy from British wholesalers and independent UK makers. That is a deliberate trade against margin: we could source the same shapes far cheaper overseas and ship them to you direct, and plenty of shops do exactly that.
We do not, for one reason that matters to you — it would mean waiting two to three weeks for a parcel, with the possibility of a customs charge at the end of it. Buying in the UK means it arrives in days, it arrives with no surprise fees, and if it goes wrong we can actually do something about it.
Orders go direct from the wholesaler’s UK warehouse to your door, which is faster than routing everything through our kitchen table first. We are a small operation and we would rather spend the money on choosing well than on a stockroom.
What we will not do
- Invent reviews. Where we have used something, we say what we thought. Where we have not, the product page says nothing rather than making it up.
- Run fake urgency. No countdown timers, no “seven other people are viewing this”, no permanent sale that was never a real price.
- Make health claims. A chew is a chew and a supplement is a food. Neither treats anything, and we will not imply otherwise.
- Pad the range. If we would not put it on our own dog, it does not go on the list.
When we get it wrong
We will. When a product turns out to be worse than we thought, we drop it and say why rather than quietly leaving it up. If you have bought something that disappointed you, tell us — that is more useful to us than a return.