Two dogs. One coffee order.
Momo is a Samoyed. She smiles all the time — not at anything in particular, that's just her face. She sheds a second Samoyed every spring. And after all the beds we have bought her, her favorite place in the house is still the cold tile in front of the bathroom.
Latte is a Border Collie. He has never once lain down without circling three times first. He is smarter than both of us and knows it. If we don't give him a job, he invents one, and it usually involves the furniture.
They belong to two people who are both named Amber. Put the dogs' names next to each other and it sounds like something you'd order at a café. That's how we ended up with a brand name instead of an argument.
One bed had to do two impossible things
Momo runs hot. She overheats in a 68° room. She needs airflow, a surface that doesn't trap heat, and a cover that survives the washing machine every single week — because a Samoyed bed that can't be washed is not a bed, it's a rug.
Latte wants the opposite. He wants an edge to press his spine against. He wants to dig at something before he commits. He wants a den, and he wants it made of fabric that doesn't pill the first time he renovates it.
Every bed we bought solved one of them and failed the other. Cooling mats: Momo approved, Latte ignored. Bolstered donut beds: Latte moved in, Momo panted. After about the sixth one we stopped buying beds and started measuring them.
And then a third problem
It also had to live in a living room.
Most dog beds look like dog beds — the kind of thing you move before guests arrive, in a color that exists nowhere else in your house. We didn't want to hide ours. So the brief got one more line, and it turned into the whole company:
Designed for your dog and your home.
What that actually means
- The bed and the cover are one product. One price, one box. You will never find the cover waiting for you at checkout as a separate line item — a bed you can’t wash isn’t finished.
- The cover comes off in one motion. A full-length zip, not four corner ties you re-thread while the dog supervises. If washing it is annoying, it doesn’t get washed.
- Colours chosen for the room, not the pet aisle. Nothing in the range is a shade you’d have to move before guests arrive.
- If the cover fails in the first year, we replace it. Not a pro-rated credit, not a discount on the next one — a cover.
Two Ambers, two time zones
One of us is in China, where the beds get designed, sampled, and argued about. One of us is in the United States, where they get packed and shipped and where the emails get answered.
One of us is awake when the other is asleep. It sounds like a problem. In practice it means someone is always up when your order comes in, and someone is always awake when a factory has a question at 2 a.m.
The dogs run quality control
Every sample goes to Momo and Latte before it goes anywhere else.
Momo tells us a bed is too warm by refusing to touch it. Latte tells us the fabric isn't durable enough by testing that himself, immediately, with enthusiasm. Neither of them has ever filled out a survey, and neither of them has ever been wrong.
Two dogs, two time zones, one bed that had to work for both of them. That's the whole thing.
— the two Ambers
(and Momo, and Latte)