As people pamper their pets more and more, dog bakeries become a stronger business idea. Here is how to tell if you could really be happy as a dog bakery owner, how to access the market for your dog bakery and the licenses you will need for your business.

Are You Suited to Owning a Dog Bakery?

The most obvious question is: Do you like to cook? Are you the sort of person who delights in making hundreds, possibly thousands of Christmas cookies every year? If you were thinking that you were going to hire someone to bake all those dog cookies, think again. Bakeries are not a way to get rich – people run them because they love to bake, they love the cookies and they love their customers. If you want to get rich, get an MBA and go to Wall Street. This brings up the next most important question: Are you expecting to get rich? You can make a good living, and maybe support a family, but you are not going to get rich with a dog bakery.

The next questions to answer are do you love dogs, do you like people, and do you enjoy shopping and seeing how things are marketed and how stores are set up? If you are good with numbers and have good business management skills, you are at an advantage, but if you are not you can hire someone to help you with that side of the business.

Can Your Market Support a Dog Bakery?

Where do you live? To make a dog bakery work you will need to live in at least a small city of 50,000 people (or live in a tourist town). If your town tends to be unusually dog-friendly, your bakery has a better chance. If there are no other dog bakeries yet, you have an even better chance.

While it is possible to run a dog bakery business over the internet, it is hard. As a bakery, your margins are poor to begin with. Adding internet sales means you will need a lot of internet marketing and internet business management skills. If you have them, that’s great.

Of course, if you went totally online, you could skip having a retail location, and thus skip paying for a retail location, but having the two sales channels (store and website) is actually a safer business model. Profitably selling things online is much harder than the internet marketing gurus would have you believe.

Licenses and Zoning for Dog Bakeries

Licensing requirements for bakeries vary state to state, county to county and even town to town. Luckily, as a dog bakery, you may benefit from the fact that many towns have not yet set requirements for dog bakeries. However, you need to be ready to met the requirements that are set out for human bakeries. You also need a retailing license… unless you are starting the business out of your home (trying to sell your dog cookies at local dog food stores in a great way to test a market, by the way). If you are starting a home-based dog bakery, ask the business licensing people about a “home restricted license”.

Take some time to decide about your business structure (LLC, etc) and whether or not you want to incorporate. Seeing a lawyer is helpful and smart, but it will use up some of your startup budget.

While you are doing all this paperwork, get yourself a resellers certificate. This will allow you to buy items wholesale, and it will allow you to sell items that are not necessarily baked goods for dogs. In fact, most dog bakeries make most of their sales off dog-related supplies that are not the dog cookies they baked. Seriously consider selling dog food, dog toys, dog books, dog leashes, dog beds, dog brushes… you get the idea.

Pamella Neely writes about how to start a dog walking business, including how to obey dog walking etiquette rules.

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