A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

Another is in the dog area. We’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from people saying, “It’s great you do this for horses. You’ve changed my life!” We’ve gotten everything from marriage proposals to people saying we’ve saved their marriages because their spouses were messing up dosages and the like. And they’re saying to us, “If you could do this for my dog, that would be incredible.” So we’re in the process of working with some dog food companies to offer dog food and supplements. Supplements for dogs are really taking off right now. There are supplements for joint health, skin and coat, changing the pH of the dog’s urine to prevent burn marks on your lawn. Supplements are getting to be more and more popular. Daily medications as well. It’s often very hard to own and care for a dog that needs to be medicated twice a day. It’s a pain in the neck. So what we’ll do is send what amounts to a TV dinner for your dog and it will make it a lot simpler to feed dogs. We think that’s going to be particularly useful for people who like that level of convenience or who use doggy daycare or who travel. They can just pack a few meals for their dog and go. That’s an initiative we’ll probably be launching in January at the same time we launch a dog catalog. That will be title No. 2, but right now we just have the one title.