A decade of HUNDE.
HUNDE started as a glimmer of an opportunity in the eye of wild thirty year-old, as I excitedly prepared to adopt my very own rescue dog, Tex Perkins. It was 2014 and I lived in a typical Brunswick sharehouse, where the beloved resident staffy was moving on to greener pastures (Northcote), freeing up space on the lease for a new hound.
HUNDE was originally going to be a raw dog food business.
When I'm excited about something, I hyperfixate on it and it consumes every available moment of my time, sometimes even in the middle of the night when I should be asleep. Needless to say, I jumped head first into the world of raw feeding and canine nutrition, determined to not be another Dr Google, and instead start a raw dog food business that was based on science and the actual best interests of dogs. What I realised through this process and while completing my studies in animal nutrition, was that we didn't actually need more dog food; we needed someone to help people navigate their pet's nutrition and pet food in general; an independent expert of sorts.
So armed with my communications background and new nutrition qualification, I leaped into the world one-on-one consulting, meticulously crafting custom meal plans for oodles of oodles, spending hours longer on them than I dared charge anyone for, and I spent a LOT of time on Instagram.
Every so often I would do a little bit of paid consulting for people I had met in the online dog community; all of us starting out in a similar fashion. We were in our bedrooms on laptops after a full day of work at our office job; packing treats in the garage after a day on the retail floor; and sewing patches on dog jackets made out of our boyfriend's old jeans in the spare room all weekend. Those women (you know who you are) are the industry leaders now and I'm proud to call some of them my closest friends.
This little bit of business-to-business work grew, and by 2021 I was running a full-time pet industry consulting business, formulating products and writing articles for some of the largest natural pet food brands in Australia. I was a ghostwriter and a published author in my own right; I had swapped Vice parties for Vice magazine interviews.
It was around this time that I started Norm with a long time client and friend, and not long after that, I found out I was pregnant.
Shit. I had just completely drained my savings by taking 4 months off to volunteer full-time in the aftermath of the Lismore floods, then a client flaked on paying a $3,000 invoice. I also knew that my one-woman-show and completely service-based business was not sustainable with a baby in tow, but I needed to somehow earn an income.
I spent the next 7 months pivoting HUNDE to be the product based business it is today, finally creating the range of products I had been formulating and dreaming of for years.
We started with just the Essential blends, and I didn't actually have a plan of where to go from there, until I started getting requests for hypoallergenic options and something that would balance a typical "intermediate" homemade diet, which so many of my long-time audience were feeding (many based on my guidance). I had coordinated everything to launch Vital and Wild blend in the last month before Sunny was born, while I was on my month of pre-baby maternity leave.
I hadn't considered that babies are strong willed and unpredictable, so I was caught completely off guard when she decided to arrive on day one of my maternity leave, just as two tonnes of meat was arriving at the freeze-dryer. In what would serve as an ominous sign of what the next two years would be like, I sent the production run sheet from my phone, in active labour on the bathroom floor.
We eventually launched Wild and Vital six months late.
Despite the challenges I face running a manufacturing business while also being the full-time primary carer of a baby and now toddler, the one thing I have been unwilling to compromise on is the quality of the products we make. If it isn't going to be perfect, I'm not interested.
This meant that I had an absolutely epic product, but everything else around it was a bit shit, because I simply don't have the capacity to do everything well. And while I'd love to click my fingers and outsource it all, the reality is being very much a small business, making an extremely premium product in the current economic climate, that just isn't possible. So it still takes me too long to reply to emails and there's still so much I want to do with Hunde, but 2024 was the year that I started chipping away at "fixing" all of the things I don't like or that I know can be better, and started again at creating a brand that I love and am proud of.
I turned 40 in 2023 and I can honestly say that I've achieved more in Hunde during the first two years of my 40s than I did in the entire decade of my 30s. So far we have a new brand identity and a new website, some new packaging and a new oil, then there will be a steady stream of other new things throughout this year and beyond, both physical and written. I am writing again and I have put together some free downloads (here and here) that are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can expect from me in the coming months.
To say that I'm excited about 2025 would be an enormous understatement (even if the vibes have been pretty grim so far, globally speaking), so here's to an absolutely ripper year! And make sure you're signed up to our mailing list to hear about new things as soon as they land.
Clare x
