Glenn Close, the five-time Academy Award nominated actress who’s probably best known for starring in “Fatal Attraction” and “The Natural,” is a co-founder. Not surprisingly, FetchDog has capitalized on her celebrity to make her the apparent face of the young firm, through her blogging about life with dogs (Close and Shaw are married and have two mixed-breed terriers named Jake and Bill.)
FetchDog makes money on sales both online and via its mail catalog, Shaw says, but the business is also focused now on building an online community of dog owners. Already, the site includes Close’s celebrity blog, video content, polls, and articles aggregated from around the Internet on pet-related topics such as adoption and veterinary care. The company is now in beta with a social networking component that will allow site users to have personal profiles and encourage more user-generated content, he adds.
Shaw, who has invested in the company through he and his family’s private equity firm Black Point Group, says that the fresh capital has allowed the startup to expand its executive ranks with new hires such as media industry veteran Claude Sheer as CEO. Sheer is a former senior executive at tech publishing and media company Ziff-Davis. Attracting other talented executives to work for the company in Maine is one of the top challenges ahead, Shaw says.
Indeed, FetchDog’s lineup of founders and executives was a draw to the institutional investors that participated in its most recent financing, Borealis Ventures and Harbor Light Capital Partners. “The story of FetchDog is an incredible dream team of people with past successful track records going after a huge market where there is no leader,” says Philip Ferneau, a managing director at Borealis Ventures in Hanover, NH., who led his firm’s investment in the firm.
It’s still early days for FetchDog, but we’ll be checking in with the firm in the future to see whether its site becomes as popular with dog owners as TheKnot.com is with couples getting married.
