Tell us your name and a little about yourself.
I am Terry Kasper, I’m 47 with close to 30 years of machining, engineering and manufacturing experience. I live in Livonia, MI and love the outdoors and my dogs.
Why did you become an entrepreneur in the first place?
It was necessary to test the market and develop the Kitchen Dog™ dish sets. We started with design, 3D printing to test and then made our own plastic injection tooling. After that we needed to test the market and demographics by doing a large number of varying types of consumers trade shows.
As an entrepreneur,how do you deal with fear or rejection?
Rejections are beneficial for ideas and continued improvement of our product and business. So I stay upbeat by focusing on the tasks that I need to be accomplished for success and learn from the rejections.
What’s the name of your company? What exactly does your company do, how do you help people?
Kitchen Dog™. We manufacture and distribute wall mounted pet feeding systems. Our feeding system eliminates the spilled food and water from pet dishes that sit on the floor. So we reduce the need for cleaning up and we also make it easier to clean the floor by eliminating the need to bend over and move the dishes.
What were the biggest challenges you have faced and how did you overcome them?
Our biggest challenge is getting our product known with little money in the marketing and advertising budgets. We are using consumer trade shows, social media and industry trade shows to increase our brand and product awareness. We have also started a program designed to work with rescues to help them raise money and also increase our social media presence.
What piece of advice do you wish someone had given you at the start of your career?
Sell on Amazon and Etsy over building an e-commerce website. This would’ve saved us the cost of web development and would’ve got us selling faster online with more product reviews.
