A $229 bully stick holder? Yup! A chat with the Treat Clincher’s creator, Susan Mravca of BarkerFun

Susan Mravca is an entrepreneur with a mission: To help people spend more time with their dogs, without their dogs bothering them. Bully sticks, she found, are great at keeping a dog occupied, but she didn’t like having to hold her dog’s chews in place in order to keep her from burying it or swallowing it. She decided to try to design something that could work—something unlike any other product she could find for this purpose—but she had one major criterion that was rather unusual: It had to be an object of great beauty. The result, which she designed with help from her brother —an engineer with a background in the Department of Defense — is the recently-launched Treat Clincher, which just won the prestigious Good Design Award. The price tag, however, will leave some pet owners aghast. Annie interviews Susan about the origins of this product (and offers a $30 coupon to the first five people to purchase a Treat Clincher at SchoolForTheDogs.com/clincher).https://storeforthedogs.com/products/treat-clincher-bully-stick-holderhttp://www.good-designawards.com/award-details.html?award=41703Previous episodes about things relating to bully sticks: https://www.schoolforthedogs.com/podcasts/a-better-mousetrap-building-the-perfect-bully-stick-holder/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-make-sure-your-dog-never-swallows-bully-stickhttps://anchor.fm/dogs/episodes/What-is-a-bully-stick--A-very-detailed-answer-to-an-awkward-question-ekd2ph/a-a3ih6c2---Partial Transcript:This episode is about a product we are just starting to sell at School For The Dogs and at StoreForTheDogs.com. And as I was editing the episode just now I was writing the product description for the online store. And this is what I wrote:Do you worry about your dog swallowing bully sticks? Do you hate having saliva coated chews or sinewy raw bones dragged all over your carpet? Does your dog make you hold her bully stick or bother you when you're on Zoom calls? Do you worry that a home strewn with dog products messes with your mid-century modern aesthetic? Are you looking to buy a pet accessory that your child will hand down for generations? If you answered yes to even one of these questions, then this product, winner of the Good Design Award 2021, may be for you.The product is the Treat Clincher, and it's pretty interesting. Its function is interesting. It's interesting looking and its creator is certainly interesting too. It's also pretty expensive. I'm gonna talk about that, but if you wanna get a visual and a spoiler alert on the price, go check out storeforthedogs.com while you are listening to this, or you can get to the product directly at schoolforthedogs.com/clincherAnnie:As a dog trainer and someone interested in all things relating to products that help us have dogs in our homes and keep them happy and give them happy lives, I've developed this kind of sub interest in bully sticks. Bully sticks being dog chews that are made from pizzle, and pizzle is the penis of a bull. And we certainly sell a lot of bully sticks in our shop and online.And I think I first started becoming interested in bully sticks in a more [laughs] academic way because I was really thinking about how did this happen? Have people who've had cattle farms always known that this was something that dogs would really enjoy?Full Transcript at SchoolForTheDogs.com/podcast Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe