The Clasp and the Hound

Beagles are the worst. 

If you ask any beagle owner, they will tell you that they are horrible, stubborn, escape-artist runaways who relentlessly follow their nose and then give the best snugs ever when/if you get them back. Mine is no exception. Charlie is half beagle/half Shiba Inu, and she is the love of my life.

I will never, ever own a beagle again. Ever. 

Off the top of my head, I can name six friends who have lost my dog. My own mother has lost her. Charlie's fight or flight reflex is such that, to fight the idea of being left behind, she flights right off and won't come back. It's terrible. She's a monster. 

A precious angel face monster.

About a month ago, we were taking our daily long walkie and it began to rain a bit. Charlie paused to shake the rain off (the technical term is flippa-flappa), and it happened - her leash came unclasped from her harness. There stood my escape-artist-precious-angel-monster, unattached to me, two miles away from home, and it was at that moment I wondered why I can't ever poop my pants somewhere convenient. 

Miraculously, I was able to grab Charlie and re-leash her before she took off, but it put me in the market for a new leash. I didn't care how much it cost; I was buying the leash with the strongest clasp on the market. I would poop my pants over my dog no more. 

My Amazon purchasing habits have come full circle - I refuse to buy anything but books from them these days, but I needed a new leash, and I needed it immediately. God forbid I get in the car and purchase something from a brick and mortar, so Amazon it was. How could they possibly screw up a leash, anyway? The next day I was in possession of a $40 leash whose product description indicated it was made specifically to lasso the untameable hound - and it squeaked incessantly against the metal of her harness. It went back to Amazon, and I went back to just buying books from Amazon. 

My quest for a new leash started anew. Don't be silly, of course I still didn't go to an actual store, I'm a busy human! I did go to a local store's website, though, and that's close. It's also basically next door to my apartment, and it's really what I should have done to begin with. 

PetPros.net is far superior to Amazon or the online marketplaces of big-box pet stores. Despite my apprehension about the navigability and available options provided by their website, I was able to find exactly what I was after. There are no reviews (which is fine because I don't trust Amazon's review farms anyway), but it's easy enough to scroll through PetPro's product selection to identify which leash clasp would perform best at public pants pooping prevention. The site is perfunctory, but it gets the job done - just like the leash I purchased. Even if the site hadn't provided the information I was after, I could walk to the "store" and "talk" to an actual "human" (thanks for helping me look up those words, Google!).

I said I'm busy.

I have only had this leash for a day and cannot yet attest to its squeakiness, but the clasp doesn’t wiggle and the shove-downy-thingy that releases the clasp is difficult enough to push down that I’m not worried about it coming undone while Charlie is doing a flippa-flappa in the rain. I hope you're enjoying this post's grown-up vernacular.

The "lever."

If a consumer insight is “a deep 'truth' about the customer based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs or desire,” as HypeInnovation defines it, it may superficially appear that Pet Pros is lacking in the “deep truth” department. However, in its website’s lack of frills, Pet Pros shows they truly understand that all pet owners want at the end of the day is for our pets to be safe, happy, and healthy. Amazon may be able to sell me Depends with my leash purchase, the intimacy is lost and due to, if nothing else, the sheer volume of products and notorious review farms, the quality difficult to verify (I can’t speak to the quality of their selection of Depends).

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that I have no recollection of actually having pooped my pants in public in at least 5 - 30 years. 

It should be noted that Pet Pros’ SEO is…lacking. If one Googles “Dog leash” + the name of the town I live in, off-leash dog parks populate above the fold. The only time Pet Pros appears is under a map, and the only thing it indicates is that it exists. There is no mention of product offerings, no ads - just the website, address and hours. Pet Pros may be the only game in town, but that doesn’t mean potential customers know it’s there or even that they sell things besides dog treats. Google Ads would serve them well. Their price point is comparable to Amazon’s. They could even advertise leashes by using Mark Pollard’s definition of an idea - “they’re ideas because they combine things that don’t belong together in useful ways” - and show a beagle not running away. 

Pet Pros is not an independently owned pet boutique by any means - they’re scattered all over Western Washington - so this doesn’t fall into the category of championing a failing mom and pop, but it does fall into the category of who even wants to go to big box stores, anyway. Pet Pros has the place, they have the price, they have the products. With a little well-placed Google promotion, they would likely save potential customers the headache of driving to PetSmart or navigating Amazon’s 1,000,000 options, with the bonus of providing customer service a customer simply won’t find in either alternative.