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Chattanooga couple ready to expand HavePaws, a home business that makes 'jerky chips' for cats, dogs
It took trial and error for Noah Falkie and Chelsee Mundy, a Chattanooga couple in their early 20s, to develop jerky treats for dogs and cats that they sell through their start-up business, HavePaws.
These days, pet stores as far away as New York and Texas carry HavePaws Jerky Chips, and the couple is preparing to move jerky production out of their Standifer Gap Road apartment and into a commercial space.
But no one bought their first effort: Glass jars of wet pet food that they tried to sell in March 2014 at the Chattanooga Market, the weekly warm-weather farmer’s market at the Tennessee Pavilion.
“Our first try was a disaster,” Falkie recalls. “Nobody wanted any of it.”
After their jars of pet food didn’t sell, Falkie and Mundy briefly tried packaging wet food in metal pouches. But the food pouches proved difficult to work with.
Then they hit on their current jerky product when, as an experiment, Falkie put the contents of a food pouch inside a food dehydrator that he had.
That produced what the couple call “jerky chips.” They’re sheets of jerky that can be broken off into small pieces for little pets, or big chunks for large animals.
“Ours is more like a chip; you can break it,” Mundy says. “It’s not … crumbly; it’s a chip.”
The jerky is made from ordinary chicken and turkey that the couple buys from Sam’s Club and dries in dehydrators in their apartment.
“It’s all breast meat,” Mundy says.
A 4-ounce package of jerky chips sells for $9.99 on the HavePaws.com website.
Pet lovers
The couple, who have one chihuahua and six cats, decided to make their own pet food after they started to eat healthier themselves. They researched commercial pet food, Falkie says, and found out “how horrible some of this stuff is.”
Falkie, who recently graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a degree in computer science, wanted to be an entrepreneur, Mundy says.
“Being his own boss was his big thing,” Mundy says. “It just happened to be pet treats.”
Mundy, who was studying business at UTC, took a break from college to focus on HavePaws. She figures she’s learning about business on the job. The couple have cold-called pet stores around the country to pitch their product.
“There’s no experience like being right in the middle of it,” she says.
Mundy and Falkie have gotten help along the way, including from Leslie May, an Atlanta-based pet business marketing consultant, Claire Wickenden, a 2015 UTC grad who designed the logo and packaging, and Ivette Rios, a small business consultant at the Tennessee Small Business Development Center in North Chattanooga.
“I think that Noah has a lot of persistance and focus, and he’s a got a passion for what he does,” Rios says. “So that’s a good combination for success.”
HavePaws has annual sales of about $20,000, Falkie said. But the business has purchase orders for more jerky than the couple can produce in their apartment.
“We’ve had a few really big orders that we had to say ‘no’ to,” Falkie says.
So they’re looking for space in which to expand. Falkie expects to move into a commercial space in the next few months.
Family and friends have helped get HavePaws going.
“My dad’s done a lot of the funding,” Falkie says. “He’s been a believer since day one.”