The winter of 1994 was a cold one in Toronto. Marianne Bertrand had three dogs and one pair of dog boots, a gag gift that made her laugh – until the temperature dropped to minus-32. “It was really cold, so I put them on the dog.”
“I stayed up until two in the morning, put all the leaves in my dining room table [to expand it], covered it with cardboard, and had the sewing machine at one end and started sewing,” she says. “I literally had them in a Ziploc bag with my phone number on it.” Raise her bar, she did. Toronto-based Muttluks Inc. is a multimillion-dollar pet products company that sells dog boots and dozens of other pet products throughout Canada, the United States, Japan, Britain and Australia.That 1997 trade mission ended up being a turning point for the company: Muttluks received loans through EDC and other federal programs to scale up and fulfil orders from U.S. customers, which more than doubled their sales almost immediately.
The company’s growth last year was 20-per-cent higher than anticipated, Ms. Bertrand says, and forecasts for next year are stronger. If companies don’t develop export markets for their products, there will be brands from outside Canada that will, he says. “Probably a lot of SMEs considering a growth path, particularly outside of Canada, they’re sort of aware of the ecosystem, but they don’t take advantage of it,” Mr. Kennedy says.