When it came to launching what is now a five-store local pet supply chain, Petagogy Owner Cole Wolfson remembers negotiating the unexpected trek to buy Fromm dog food, an independent family-owned brand of pet food that his dog preferred.
Instead of finding it at a nearby grocery store, Wolfson and his wife Heather Blum had to leave their home in Shadyside and drive out to the North Hills just to find the food Deeka, a corgi chihuahua mix they adopted from Animal Friends, would eat.
That nagging chore translated into the kind of “what if” that motivated Wolfson and Blum to tag-team with another couple, Elsie Lampl and Ben Huber, who were also dealing with what seemed like unnecessarily long trips to buy food for their two dogs, Jack and Bumblebee, to start the kind of store close to home that could keep other dog owners like them from leaving town for dog food.
They first launched Petagogy with its initial location on Ellsworth Avenue in Shadyside in 2011, offering a variety of premium and natural pet foods hard to find elsewhere.
“I had recently got an MBA and threw together a business plan. My wife was graduating with her master’s in communication,” Wolfson recalled while speaking at a recent BEAM Collaborative event held at The Distillery Complex on the South Side. “The other partners, the wife was a working attorney and the husband had just been laid off as a teacher. And so we threw together a business planning and said, ‘hey, let’s go out and try it.’”
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