Hoping Canines Will Lap It Up

Herself the owner of a border collie mix, a volunteer at a canine rescue organization and a regular participant in a dog play group, Susan Goldberg told me, “I’m the epitome of my own demographic.”

By that she means the demographic of K9 Water Co., the Valencia firm she started two years ago to sell flavored and enriched bottled water for dogs.

While Goldberg won’t divulge her revenue or profit beyond claiming that “we’re holding our own,” she says K9 water is currently available in all 50 states and several foreign countries. She says sales are growing at a pace that she hopes will allow her eventually to give up her day job as an accountant to work full time selling pet supplies.

Goldberg is tapping into what is unarguably a vigorously expanding consumer market. The devotion of Americans to their pets is a byword. There are 65 million owned dogs in the United States and 78 million owned cats, according to the Humane Society of the United States (which is apparently agnostic on the question of whether anybody ever really “owns” a cat).

It’s probably fair to say that at least half of all American households have at least one cat or dog, or both. A few years ago, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that veterinary services would be among the fastest-growing industries of the decade, expanding at three times the pace of the general economy. One reason, it said, was that a larger percentage of dogs and cats belonged to aging baby boomers willing to spend lavishly on their pets’ health.

Pet-owning families tend to anthropomorphize their animals, which creates great marketing opportunities. A couple of years ago, Hasbro and Petsmart teamed up to create Paws’n More, a line of pet toys (Puppy’s First Key Teether, etc.) directed at what a company executive reportedly identified as “people who think of and treat their pets like children.”

A 2000 survey published by Ralston Purina Co. determined that 43% of all dog owners celebrated their pets’ birthdays, a statistic that evokes troubling images of glum Labradors stuck wearing silly party hats. (I can honestly say that in my house, we have never celebrated our dog’s birthday. On the other hand, she does celebrate all our birthdays and is known for the invariably high standards of taste and wit in her choice of birthday cards.)

Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the craze for bottled water for humans would inspire a similar craze for dogs. The pioneer in the market is generally considered to be Pawier Inc., based in the Calaveras County town of Wallace.

“Everybody laughed at me,” says Joan Bohl, who founded Pawier (pronounced PAW-yay) in 1990 after retiring from Pacific Bell. Bohl developed a vitamin-enriched, chlorine-free formula to serve her picky Shetland sheepdog, and in time she was shipping it all over the world. She gave up that end of the business in 2000, however, because shipping filled bottles proved as expensive as shipping steel. (That’s an issue Goldberg has encountered too.) Pawier now markets a more cost-effective vitamin concentrate to customers who are advised to add it to purified water before administering it to pets.

Several other companies followed Pawier, including one (now defunct) that sold a product with carbonation and sugar, which earns Bohl’s disdain.

K9 was born at a Woodland Hills canine play group where Goldberg and other owners spent their time trading stories about their dogs’ unsavory tastes in water. “You know dogs, they like alternative water sources,” she says. “Toilets, puddles, gutters.”

She established her company in classic entrepreneurial fashion, tapping a former work colleague, Don Magier, as a financial source (he’s a partner in the company), and another friend with experience in graphic art to design the bottles’ whimsical labels.

She designed a website to take orders and worked with nutritional specialists to find the right combinations of vitamins, supplements and flavoring, which involved a certain amount of trial and error. “In the first batches, the flavor was so concentrated that it was like chicken stock,” Goldberg says.

The process of lining up veterinary specialists and bottle suppliers and navigating the thickets of labeling and bottle-return rules took about a year. Eventually she settled on four varieties, labeled Hose Water, Gutter Water, Puddle Water and Toilet Water, flavored, respectively, with lamb, beef, liver and chicken. Goldberg says that’s a sufficiently wide variety to offer most dogs something they’ll like, although a product test I conducted at my local dog park was inconclusive. After we poured all four varieties into the park’s drinking bowls, we found that most of the clientele didn’t seem to know what to make of them and stuck to the unflavored brand X.

“Not all take immediately to it,” Goldberg acknowledges. “Not all dogs love all flavors, and some love only some of it.” Some customers finesse the sheer novelty of the water, she says, by pouring it over their pets’ food.

But she says the expansion of sales through word of mouth and at dog events suggests that the flavored water is finding general canine acceptance. “The doggie business is just exploding, with dog resorts and dog spas everywhere.” One Westsider of her acquaintance is working to find sites for a chain of dog-friendly coffee shops to be called, inevitably, Pawbucks.

“I know this business will be huge in a year or two,” she says, adding that she has already fielded inquiries about expanding her line in a direction that her core consumers might not like – into water for cats.

You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.