The year was 2009. I was backpacking with my trusty Schnauzer, Travis Barker, and we settled down for a mountaintop sleep. Schnauzers love to burrow, so Travis made his way down to the bottom of my sleeping bag, which I thought would be great for keeping my feet warm. There was just one problem: insulation needs to trap air to work, but if you flatten it, by, for example, overfilling a sleeping bag, it doesn’t insulate! So, after a night of cold feet and a cold dog, I set out to find a solution for both of those things. Given enough space, we should be able to share heat and keep each other warm, so I started thinking about what that might look like. I had just started my softgoods design business, and, well, I didn’t have any clients, so this was the perfect thing to develop my skills and occupy my time. The first prototype was pretty crude, but upon testing, it worked! And, Barker seemed pretty happy to stay snuggled in there all night long.
Inspired by this success, I began refining the design. First, I realized that the ability to keep him from running around at night was a huge plus, so I added a collar with a buckle to secure him even better. Secondly, I realized that a more teardrop shape would work better with my mummy bag, and it was definitely a lot more aesthetically pleasing. The only problem was dealing with the handedness of sleeping bags…I knew there were different types of zippers, but what about this issue? Well, right about that time I fell in love, and one day while zipping our bags together for a trip, I realized that the solution was putting zippers on both sides of the dog sleeping bag! Not only could it be used on either side of a mummy bag, but it could also zip in between. In addition, when using it with one bag, you could also put the dog in through the outside zipper. The final development prototype worked out great:
After that, I worked with a local factory to create production prototypes in different sizes and zipper configurations, and it was off to Kickstarter! We got great writeups from Cool Hunting and Gear Patrol, and even went a little bit viral, which pushed us over our funding goal and we were ready for production. Since then we’ve sold them all over the world and it’s been a joy helping folks figure out the right bag for their pups.