#123: Tory & Michael Waxman (Sundays)

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:00:00]:

My clients used to come to me and say, oh, you know, I found this new food. It says it's all natural, but then there'd be an asterisk and it would say, with added vitamins and minerals. Or they'd bring in a food and it would say human grade, but then there'd be an asterisk and it would say, made with human grade ingredients, but not made in a human grade facility. And I honestly just felt like these companies were clearly just marketing companies that happened to make dog food. And I said, well, what if we didn't have asterisks? What if we said we are human grade, we were human grade. And what if when I said we are all natural, we were all natural. And we're one of very few dog foods out there on the market that has no added vitamins and minerals. All of our vitamins and minerals come from natural sources.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:43]:

Let's discover what people are building in the greater Cleveland community. We are telling the sToryes of northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the lay of the land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the real pleasure of speaking with Tory and Michael Waxman, the founders of Sundays. Sundays for dogs is a leading dog food brand, offering the first human grade air dried dog food made with 100% all natural ingredients that is healthier than kibble but easier than refrigerated food since it doesn't require a freezer, prep, or cleanup. In pursuit of their mission to make it easier to begin awesome dog parent and to feed millions of dogs around the globe, Tory and Michael have raised over $14 million for Sundays based here in Cleveland. As they've grown the business to offer modern dog parents everything that they are looking for, including quality, taste, convenience, and affordability. And the proof is in the dog food. As in a blind taste test, dogs preferred Sundays 20 to zero over the bestselling dry dog food. Dr. Tory Waxman, a practicing small animal veterinarian, and Michael Waxman, an engineer land serial entrepreneur, founded Sundays together when their dog Mabel, who lay make brief cameos in this episode today, became sick. Together, they became obsessed with finding dog food that could improve Mabel's health. And although they searched, which you'll hear all about in our conversation today, they could not find dog food that was healthier than kibble, but easier to feed than home cooked foods. And thus Sundays was born. This conversation was a ton of fun. Tory and Michael have an amazing story exude such a passion for their work and are building an incredible company with Sundays. So I hope you all learned from it as much as I did. Please enjoy our conversation after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by air CFO, whose story we actually shared back on episode 23 of Lay of the Land with Air CFO's founder and CEO Justin McLaughlin. For many founders, dealing with finances and taxes is stressful, confusing and time consuming. Yet without paying proper attention to your finances and taxes, you won't be able to produce accurate nor timely financials land forecasts for your team or for your investors. And even worse, if you miss critical tax deadlines, you'll get hit with unnecessary penalties from the IRS. These kinds of financial land tax missteps can jeopardize your entire startup and your vision. Running a startup is hard enough. Work with Air CFO and you'll get best in class finance, accounting, HR and tax support. Air CFO takes care of your back office so you can focus on growing from startup to scale up as a layoftheland listener. Visit Aircfo.com for more information and to set up a call and tell them layoftheland sent you. Again. That's aircfo.com. The link will be in the show notes. So I have to put a disclaimer at the onset out there, which is that I've never had a dog before growing up in New York City, my feeling was always that my two younger brothers filled that void as proverbial man's best friend, as they are mine. But I did grow up around dogs, and at this point in my life, I now have many friends who have dogs, and I've vicariously got to experience and see dogs become part of the family. And of course, you always want what is best for your family. And I know some of the impetus here for the work that you two are doing at Sundays comes from this kind of motivation, too. And so I'd love to start with your backgrounds and how these motivations have unfolded to put you on this journey, to forgive the pun here, but grow a pet project and figure out the best dog food for your own dogs and to ultimately build a company where you can eat your own dog food.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:04:56]:

Well, as long as you're not a cat person, we can proceed with the interview. Even though you don't have a dog.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:02]:

I'm allergic to cats. So we're good.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:05:04]:

Perfect. Well, yeah, look, I like to joke. The reason Sundays exist is because a software engineer married a veterinarian, and we're both huge dog people. Tory, as you'll hear, more so than me, but I grew up in Cleveland with a somewhat ridiculously high number of dogs, so my family probably averaged about five or six dogs at any given time. And as a result, whenever I run into a friend from growing up, Land, I tell him I'm running a dog food company. No one is surprised. I'll say, that land. Tory obviously devoted her whole life to animals, but I'll let her tell you about that. Yeah.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:05:49]:

So I'm originally from Chicago and then I went to undergraduate and vet school out east, which is how I ended up in New York City. I was a practicing veterinarian in New York City. Honestly, starting a company was never on my radar, but Michael is extremely obsessive. And one day he asked me, why do we feed our dogs the food we feed? And I said, oh, well, it's fine. And most of the companies that claim that they're better, it's just marketing that's not actually better. And of course, Michael, being Michael, said, well, what if we can make something better? Land I was like, well, you could cook for your dog, but let's be honest, we DoorDash all the time. Like, I don't even cook for us. I'm not going to be cooking for our dogs here. I mean, no offense, Mabel, I love you, but don't cook for ourselves every night, so definitely not cooking for you. We joke that Sundays was made for Mabel, but it's really true. I wanted to make a food that I felt great feeding my own dog. And if I could then kind of grow that and share it with other dogs, so be it. But it honestly stemmed from a passion and a desire to do best by my own dogs, but also realizing that I'm human, I had a life. I wasn't going to sit there and cook for my dog all day. And so, yeah, that's honestly, it's really just started as like a little project between Michael and I to try to find best food for our own dogs. When we couldn't find it, we decided to make it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:10]:

Land michael, did you always have these entrepreneurial inclinations?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:07:15]:

So I am descended from, at this point, a line of maybe four generations of entrepreneurs. So my great grandfather, who came over from Eastern Europe to Boston, started a business there 100 years ago, and my grandfather started one and my father started one and was involved in the steel industry in Cleveland. And so it is something that I grew up talking about around the dinner table. I think it's one of those things that even when I graduated high school in 2005, I think being an entrepreneur, being a founder, lived at a very different place in the culture than it does now. This was before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And so I think it's something that's kind of probably been in my blood for a long time, but maybe it's something I was destined to do. But I think now is maybe the most exciting and most fun time to be a founder with all the amazing technology out there and all the infrastructure that's been built up in the past 20 years to help people start businesses. So I feel very fortunate for that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:35]:

So when you're collectively exploring the options that are available for Mabel to feed your own dog, how do you come to the conclusion that what is out there is not sufficient? And that what seems like from the outside is a very competitive and saturated space already that there is this opportunity for something better.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:09:00]:

I mean, the first thing we did when this started, as a curiosity, long before it was a business idea, we tried an absurd amount of foods. And so this is back.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:09:13]:

This was in our 500 square foot New York City apartment. We ordered like 50 different kinds of dog food, if you can imagine.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:09:21]:

Yeah, and I mean, it was literally like piled to the ceiling of our tiny apartment of all these different foods. And I think ultimately, we just felt really strongly that everything was kind of either clearly not enough or clearly too much, right? There were sort of these two extremes. So on the one hand, you had kibble, which the more we learned about it, just incredibly processed junk food, low quality, very affordable and easy, but smelled bad. Our dogs didn't love it, didn't do well on it. And then you had this other end of the spectrum of home cooked food, raw food that was sort of the opposite set of problems. So it was healthier, it smelled better. Sometimes, not always it looked better, but it was so messy, such a hassle. You had to thaw it or add water, land, clean up from it. And so it just felt like we kind of had to pick between two pretty bad options of either sort of easy but junk, or better, but a total hassle. And taking a step back, we realized that we weren't alone. And a lot of people were asking this question of what do you feed the dog who sleeps in your bed? Right, like our dogs do, and what's not enough and what's too much? And we realized that no company had really answered that question in a way that resonated with a lot of people. And there are over 4000 dog foods you could buy in the US. And so there's no shortage of people making dog foods. But I think before Sundays there really was a shortage of foods that kind of offered that sweet spot of quality and convenience and not having to choose one or the other.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:11:31]:

The other thing, if I can jump in as a veterinarian, my clients used to come to me and say, oh, I found this new food. It says it's all natural, but then there'd be an asterisk and it would say, with added vitamins and minerals. Or they'd bring in a food and it would say human grade, but then there'd be an asterisk and it would say, made with human grade ingredients, but not made in a human grade facility. And I honestly just felt like these companies were clearly just marketing companies that happened to make dog food. And I said, well, what if we didn't have asterisks? What if we said we are human grade, we were human grade. And what if when I said we are all natural, we were all natural, and we're one of very few dog foods out there on the market that has no added vitamins and minerals. All of our vitamins and minerals come from natural sources. I like to joke, are you better off going to McDonald's and then taking a multivitamin or eating a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables and proteins to get your essential vitamins and nutrients and minerals? But I believe that, and I think it's so important to provide optimal nutrition and not just be out there trying to sell your product and have asterisks all over your bag to explain why it's actually not what it says. And that always really drove me crazy. And honestly, it drove Michael crazy because it took us a lot longer to launch, because to meet all those strict requirements that I set forth, when he wanted to go on this journey, I said, well, we need to meet all these strict requirements that I'm setting forth. And it took us a lot longer, but I'm glad we took the time and did it. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:04]:

So when you think about creating a better dog food for the dog that will sleep in your bed right, with you, how do you actually go about getting started? What is the process for creating dog food? Understanding that you've done this research, you recognize the gap in the market. How do you create a non asterisk authentic dog food?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:13:28]:

Where I'll start is something that Tory and I both felt really strongly about, maybe for slightly different reasons. But ultimately, we really 100% agreed on this. We didn't want to spend our time on this unless we were putting something into the universe that was genuinely new. Land better. Right? From my background as a founder, land, a product designer, land, Tory's background as a veterinarian, we both felt like if we were just going to private label something off the shelf that somebody was already selling or that you could already buy that just wasn't kind of worth our time. Right? Like, what are we really contributing to society, to our fellow humans and fellow dogs? If we're just buying something off the shelf and putting a shinier wrapping paper on it, who cares? So one consequence of that was, ultimately we ended up having to kind of piece together our entire supply chain from scratch, right? Because one option that we did look at was, oh, yeah, what if we call up the dog food manufacturing store and say, hey, we want to make a dog food that does all these things? And of course, they said, well, we can't do that. If we could, we would, but we can't. And we have all these expensive millions of dollars of machines and extrusion equipment, and this is what we can do. We can only use up to 25% meat, which was like a wait, only 25? I thought dogs wait. 25 is the maximum, and the rest has to be dough and grains and legumes. We're like, that was weird. And it's like, yeah, but all these constraints. And so that ended up setting us down like what was a pretty long road that took multiple years, literally took us across the globe. We ended up flying to New Zealand with our daughter, who was four months old at the time. And we have this amazing picture of the two of us land our daughter in this meat freezer in New Zealand. And oftentimes I think the hard way is the better way. And it ended up being quite a long slog and quite a schlep to do it, but ultimately, essentially built out a new supply chain from scratch. And that was the only way we could bring these sort of new features and benefits to market for the first time. And ultimately, it's funny, our sort of second choice manufacturer was in New Zealand, but our initial partner that we ended up making our food with was a jerky kitchen right here in Ohio. And so it's just one of those funny things of sometimes you have to traverse the world only to realize that what you needed was right in front of you. But that's kind of the short version of the story.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:53]:

I'm curious at what point you had decided to take this from a prep project and be serious about it, because that sounds like quite an undertaking to build out an entire supply chain from scratch and to work towards a really robust processor.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:17:11]:

Yeah, I think this is sort of my third startup where I raised money from investors and kind of did the whole thing. So while this world was totally new to Tory and I give her a ton of credit for sort of diving into the deep end with me on her first startup, but for me, having done this a few times, I sort of had a list of criteria of things I was looking for if I was going to go on the incredibly difficult, at times lonely, impossible founder journey. Again, it was like, okay, these are the things that need to be true in order for me to want to do that. And again, sort of skipping over some of the details, as we kind of learned more about dog food and learned more about what was out there, what wasn't out there, how would we do it? It just kind of became apparent that there was a really exciting opportunity here in kind of the ways that mattered to us, in the sense that there was really an opportunity to do something new and different and put something into the world that people really wanted, starting with us, but in our friends. But we felt like, wow, this is really something new and different that people would want land care about, and that it could maybe be a really good, profitable business too. Right? Because yeah, maybe to make a dog food like the one we wanted would cost a million dollars a month or something, and we could do it but no one would buy it at that price. But we sort of learned enough to know, okay, on the one hand, we can't really make it within the existing supply chain. But one startup saying that I like is sort of today's headache is tomorrow's moat, right? And so if you can do something that's really difficult in the short term, oftentimes that creates a business advantage in the long run because it's difficult for everyone else too. And then just kind of putting some pieces together, it's like, wow, this is a huge opportunity, a big market. The business model really makes sense. In order to do it right, we're going to have to invest in some infrastructure, figure out some manufacturing, and so it's probably going to cost a little bit of money. So we probably need to raise money from outside investors. So that kind of ended up setting us down that path. And then in 2018, I think it was, as I like to joke, startup years are like dog years. So it feels like about 100 years ago, but I think it was late 2018. We raised some seed investors from some folks that I had worked with previously, from some new people who were kind of specialists in D to C or CPG businesses, mostly out of New York where we were at the time and we kind of dove in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:27]:

It's a fascinating journey there. I'm thinking about it a little bit from the culinary perspective. I know when a chef is like, fine tuning their recipe, it's a lot of iterations, there's a lot of mistakes. Experiments where they start is probably not where they end. From the dog food creation standpoint, how did you know you had arrived at the right one?

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:20:52]:

Well, there's a lot of kind of behind the scenes formulation and testing that goes into creating a new dog food recipe, obviously. So first everything is done on paper, but honestly, most of the software that exists is all made for kibble. And so I would talk to some nutritionist and they would say, yeah, no, what you're trying to do is not a thing. Like you can't not use artificial vitamins and minerals, land make complete and balanced dog food that's just no. And it was kind of end of conversation with a lot of nutritionists. They thought we were absolutely crazy trying to do what we were doing, but we kept pushing on and we kept iterating and we kept reaching for different natural sources of different vitamins and minerals. And not to get too into the nitty gritty, but basically there is a published guide for the required nutrients and micronutrients vitamins and minerals that are required for all dog food. They actually are in charge of publishing kind of for all different types of animals. But obviously the dog food is the one that we concentrate on and so we ran a bunch of iterations of our diet and then put it through a multitude of testing to make sure it actually reached what we had calculated on paper. And because we were kind of forging ahead in a new novel production type for dog food, we had to do a lot of test batches and kind of see where our test results ended up. So there was a lot of trial and error. But eventually we arrived at kind of our initial recipe, which is our beef recipe. And then after we made the recipe, I don't know if you call them our poor dogs, our lucky dogs were definitely our first tough subjects for things like Palatability Land stool quality. We joke that if you're a part of the Sunday's team, we talk a lot about poop. But it's true. We talk a lot about poop here on the team. But it's really important to dog parents. They pick up their dog's poop every day. It's really important that they have great stool quality. It's really important that they have great palatability. So all of those little things, we have to make sure they're addressed before the dog food ever hits the market. So even if the recipe is perfect on paper and the lab results are perfect, if the palatability isn't good or the stool quality is not good, then the recipe is not good. So a lot of T's to cross and I's to Dot.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:23:06]:

Yeah, I mean, the two things I'd add to that are one, when she said trial and error, that doesn't really do it justice. We went through over 100 recipes before we got to our first one. So sort of that age old entrepreneurial story of like Thomas Edison with all the filaments where we literally went through over 100 iterations of that first recipe before it was just right because we were trying to do all these things that had never been done before. And then the only other thing I just would point out, taking a step back is the thing that is easy to forget about dog food compared to human food is that most dogs get all their nutrition from a single source. And so there's this extra requirement to make sure it has all these different nutrients in it, which our food doesn't really have because we're snacking and eating on all sorts of different stuff. To Tory's point, the way the industry has been up until present lay for the most part, is that the approach is basically, here's McDonald's, and then take a multivitamin and that's how you get all the nutrients you need. But doing it with Whole Foods and doing it using this air drying process at a jerky kitchen rather than the way they make kibble, which is they sort of make a dough in a process called hot extrusion. The only way to really figure it out was to try a bunch of ways that didn't quite work until we figured out the one that did. And then, of course, by the time we had figured it out and we were ready to launch. It was February 2020, which ended up being a funny time to finally have it ready.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:00]:

Yeah. During which I think a lot of people got dogs. And we're probably thinking about this.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:25:05]:

Yeah, I mean, probably one of our best sToryes that we should, you know, from our our journey, that we should probably do, like, do a whole podcast series just about this story. But we finally got to the starting line, february 2020. We literally launched to about our 101st customers that we didn't know. So our dogs and some friends dogs had been eating the food for a lot of 2019, and our dogs had been eating it for over a year. But we finally had perfected the recipe. We were producing it at scale. February 2020 with this jerky kitchen in Ohio. We get our first hundred customers, COVID Hits. We're a subscription business. And so we have 100 customers. And we basically only had something like 100 boxes of food. But we were like, okay, we could make another 100 boxes of food to send them in March and so on. So our manufacturer calls us up right after COVID Hits land. You may recall there was a national closure of meat processing plants, which for whatever reason, were one of the first kind of places where you're seeing these really bad COVID outbreaks. And our manufacturer calls us, he goes, Michael Tory, I've been in the meat business for 30 years. I've never experienced this before, but I can't buy any meat at any price, so sorry I can't make any more food for you. And at that moment, there was a part of me that genuinely just thought, all right, well, I guess that's the end of the road. We'll send out our resumes tomorrow, and what more can we do? And then after sort of getting over that initial sort of sense of defeat, we literally just like, well, we use human grade foods just from grocery stores and grocery store suppliers. Someone somewhere has to have meat. So we literally just started cold calling places. So being in Cleveland, we called Hynens. We were like, hey, Hynes, could we buy 10,000 pounds of ground beef from you? And they told us no, but the we're like, okay, well, maybe there's another grocery store that has meat. And long story short, there was a direct to consumer steak company that I had heard about, didn't know about, didn't have any special connection to them. I just emailed the contact us on their website and I said, hey, you guys have ground beef? I'm looking to buy a huge quantity of it for my dog food business. Is there any way you can so they email me back there, okay, yeah, sure. Like $2 a pound. And mind you, this is dry aged, grass fed, pasture raised, like steak quality ground land. Then Yatsu spoiled the story, but ended up making the finest batch of dog food ever made before since. And then the funny thing is cool 10,000 pounds. And we had never bought our own meat before because our manufacturer did it land. So I was like, okay, is there like a tracking number or something that you could send us land? They're like, oh, no, I don't think you understand. We're just a family farm too. So I'm putting this in my truck and I'll call you when I get there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:39]:

And we were like, wow, okay.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:28:42]:

And so we made production. We also made the finest batch of dog food ever produced before since we were able to serve those initial 100 customers and keep going. And then, of course, as I think often is the case in startups, one, it's a lot about luck, but two, it's a lot about just kind of staying in the arena and staying alive so that you have the opportunity to be lucky. And for us, as you alluded to, COVID ended up being a huge tailwind for the entire pet industry. The US. Dog population grew by as much as 20% just during that first year of COVID And people, of course, shifted buying patterns online faster than we were expecting. And so after just barely avoiding death in March, by April, things just started to take off land. It's really kind of been off to the races ever since, but what an incredible story.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:42]:

Quintessential startup experience.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:29:44]:

Yeah. And well, and at the same time with COVID as you remember, shipping and importing, all those things kind of shut down during the height of COVID And so it actually ended up being a blessing in disguise that most of our supply chain was domestic. And so while all these dog food companies were struggling to get all these ingredients from abroad, most of our ingredients are from right here in the United States. And so we were really lucky in that we never had any ingredient shortages, which most even human food companies couldn't say during the time of code. I don't know if you remember, like, even restaurants were having food shortages and things like that. So we really lucked out.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:20]:

Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. So maybe just fast forwarding a little bit. Where's the company today? How do you describe Sundays as it is? How has it evolved? Just kind of paint the picture of of what it looks like in the present.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:30:36]:

Today we have tens of thousands of dogs eating sundaes, which, you know, I don't know if our own dogs are excited by or jealous of that fact. I think that they were a little confused when we started shipping it to customers. They're like, wait, why are you sending this food away? I don't get it. And we have two recipes. Just goes to show kind of how hard it is to produce these recipes in the way that we do. And our third one is actually coming out in the next. Couple of weeks, which we're very excited about. We have a team of about 30 full time people. A few of the others are here in Cleveland, but we're a remote first team, so we don't have any offices and we're distributed across the US. That's sort of the very short version of it, but we want to help dog parents. You want to make it easier for the modern dog parent, right? I think even before COVID but especially in the times we live in today, it's stressful being a dog parent these days, and there's so many products and services to choose from. And probably the most confusing and overwhelming of that is which food do you feed this family member who is humanized and part of the family on one level, but is also a different species ultimately, that has their own nutrition requirements and taste preferences. I think we just feel very fortunate to be in a position where we've served so many dogs and humans and hopefully given people the opportunity to spend just a little bit more quality time with their pups. But we're just getting started. There's over 100 million dogs in the US. And by comparison, just a tiny, tiny fraction eats Sundays today. And hopefully that continues to grow every year.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:37]:

If you peruse Sunday's website, something you'll find, I think, pretty quickly there, is that dogs preferred Sundays 20 to zero over the best selling dry dog food, which is an incredible finding. So I'd love to unpack what the reception has been so far, both from the dog's perspective and from dog parents perspective.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:33:02]:

I feel like it's cheating, but our recipes are over 90% meat. And as Michael was saying earlier, kibble can only be up to 25% meat in the formulation. And so right then and there, it's kind of unfair, but we wanted to do the test anyways. And also, a lot of kibbles contain palatants to make them more palatable because the food is heated and treated to such high pressures that most of the palatability is lost. So most kibbles contain palatants. And so we were just curious. And so we ran a test to see if dogs preferred sundaes over the leading selling kibble. And so, as I said, we take things really seriously. As a scientist myself, it's one thing to say, hey, it's 90% meat, it must taste better, but it's another thing to actually see that data.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:33:50]:

The other funny behind the scenes story there is some dog food websites will have these claims done in the same way, where it's like, dogs prefer our food two to one or three to one. And so that's what we were thinking, right where it would be, oh, dogs prefer Sundays five to one. And then we got the results back in this 20 page, very scientific report. It was just like, they all chose Sundays, and we're like, all right, that's awesome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:20]:

It was an unambiguous signal. That's amazing. So one of the things Michael you had mentioned was really this whole kind of direct to consumer approach. And so is there a role for traditional pet food retailers? How is the actual sales mechanism worked here?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:34:38]:

Yeah, that's such an interesting question because I think, as a lot of people will say, direct to consumer is just a channel, it's not a business model. Right. And it's one way that we can get our amazing food to dogs is through our website. And that's where we started. And to date, it's the only way that you can buy Sundays for a few reasons, the biggest one of which is it just allows us to have a direct connection with our customers. And when you're starting out land we're still developing our products and really trying to figure out exactly what are the pain points of our customers and how we can solve those better. And when our end using customers can't talk, it's all the more important to have that really close connection with the user and with the customer. But we have a shelf stable product and so it's not really a matter of if, but when we'll sell Sundays in other places beyond our website. Land it's definitely something that's on our radar. Land so one day you'll be able to buy Sundays in many places. But for the foreseeable future, I think we're still focused on just selling food through our website because, again, it lets us not just have that direct connection with the customer so that we can learn more about them and their needs. But it also lets us control the experience and deliver the quality of not just product, but things like customer service, which, once you sell in other places, that kind of gets a little bit out of your control. Right? And so if we one day sell on Amazon or something like that, you have to be willing to live with the fact that, yeah, people might get a damaged box of your food and they may not be able to get in touch with someone. Land for now, we just want to delight our customers and give the the best experience possible. And we just feel like the easiest way to do that is letting people buy the product directly from us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:51]:

And how have you been able to cultivate those relationships over time? What is the kind of role that you see for the land of Sundays playing in the delivery of the actual product?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:37:04]:

One of the things we talk about internally is that you feed your dog 730 times a year. Land so if we can just make you smile or make your life just like a little bit easier every time you feed your dog, that can add up to a really powerful emotional response to our brand. It's ever evolving, right? Like for us, we want the main focus to be just on the food itself and kind of that experience. And it smells fresh like artisanal jerky because that's what it is. And making sure your dog gobbles it up and has great poops and a healthier coat, those are sort of the core things that matter. But as we also like to say, we sell dog food. Let's take the food part seriously, but not take the dog part too seriously, right. And be playful and have fun, because dogs are fun and that's one of the many things we love about them. And so we've done some fun things in the past. Previously we did a limited edition run where you could upload a photo of your dog and we'd print it directly on our cereal box packaging. And that was sort of a fun thing that people really got a kick out of and something we plan to bring back in the future. But yeah, I think dogs just bring so much joy to people's lives that if we can just kind of tap into a little bit of that and do some fun, playful things, I think that's kind of how we got to where we are, by doing some of these fun things like the custom cereal boxes. And as our team grows and we have a little bit more capabilities and stuff, we hope to do even more fun things like that in the future.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:01]:

In asking that last question, I realized I don't actually understand the name of the company. Why is it called Sundays?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:39:10]:

Yeah, it's funny. So before it was a company, land, when Tory and I were still living in New York, we would joke that our dogs would know what day of the week it was and know that on Sunday it meant neither of us were going into work and they would get to spend the whole day with us. And so they'd wake up kind of early and excited and pause and be like, guys, this is the day that both of you guys don't go to work. And we kind of just zeroed in on that as what our brand land, our reason for being is all about of giving you more quality time with your dogs. And we're trying to kind of just evoke that feeling of sort of that easy Sunday morning vibe where you kind of don't have a care in the world land you kind of get to spend the whole day with your loved ones and that was sort of the origin of it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:19]:

You had mentioned the kind of growth of the team. I know recently you also have closed on a pretty sizable funding round as well, all with this ambition in mind of reaching the goal to feed a million dogs, land, help 10 million more by 2025. How do you plan to achieve this? What is the impact here that you're hoping to have on the dog food industry overall?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:40:44]:

You know, I think the the short version of how we do that is just by serving our customers and obsessing over their needs and solving their problems better than other dog food companies is kind of the high level approach. I think more specifically, if we do a good job and fulfill our potential, I think we'll kind of raise the standard of dog food for all dogs. Right. A generation ago, a lot of dogs still slept outside and ate really low quality kibble, or maybe they even ate table scraps and didn't even have their own food. But as we've continued to elevate dogs from pets to family members and brought them in from the backyard, and now more than two thirds of dogs sleep in bed with their human parents, we're trying to just kind of elevate the entire category. You know, I think the logical conclusion of of what we do is that, you know, one day perhaps there won't be kind of separate standards for dogs and humans, right? Like right now, we're a human grade food because we hold ourselves to higher quality standards and ingredients and processing than 99% of dog foods. But ten years from now, maybe there'll just be kind of one standard in everything that dogs eat will be kind of at the level of quality that we consider necessary for human food.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:31]:

I have to ask there, and this is not me as again, I'm allergic to cats, so this is not a cat ad.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:42:40]:

I hear a question. Cat person question. Incoming.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:43]:

Well, I am curious, right, if we're talking about the elevation of pets overall as part of the family, is there a vision at some point to or I guess maybe the question is, like, how extensible is the quality of the food and the work that you've done here to other animals? And is that within the vision? Have you guys thought about that? What's the perspective there?

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:43:07]:

Cats honestly are a little bit more difficult customers. It's actually a funny thing. Like, you can take a cat that's eaten a food its entire life and offer it something so much better and they'll turn their nose about it. And so cats are just palatability is a lot more difficult with cats. Cats are obligate carnivores, so their nutrition requirements are a little bit different than dogs who are technically omnivores. I would argue they're carnivorous omnivores, but that's a whole nother discussion. So cats are honestly a whole other animal. No pun intended, but so we have not considered doing a cat food at this point. Although we joke that if we did, we'd call it cater days.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:47]:

I would have been remiss if I didn't ask about it. How has it been working together as partners? I've been able to chat with a few folks who have done familial businesses, working with a spouse, a partner, a brother, a sister. And it's always interesting to hear that perspective of it.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:44:10]:

Yeah, I mean, when we started, we were working together in a one bedroom apartment, and it was just the two of us for the first few years, and I think that was a lot more challenging. It's actually funny now at this point, even though we work out of the same house, what we do on a day to day basis is so specialized that honestly, we don't have much interaction, kind of from nine to five. And we're pretty strict about after hours trying to not discuss the business and really make family time. Family time. We have human children in addition to dog children, so we really try to keep it separate. Land as the team has grown, it's been really fun to kind of be able to grow into more of kind of what I want to do day to day instead of not that. I mean, look, we have incredible people that run our ingredient procurement and fulfillment and billing and all those things that used to fall under my umbrella. But I am so thankful that people that are actually talented in these areas are running those areas because as a veterinarian, that was definitely not my skill set. Land so I love seeing all these people we hire that actually are skilled in these areas, take my horrible spreadsheets and run and improve our business in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:22]:

So many ways, for sure.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:45:24]:

And the only other thing I'd add there is I think there is a lesson in the fact that I think what kind of makes a marriage work or what makes two spouses kind of work together, I think are really similar to what makes co founders work together in a company. I think there's a lot of overlap there, right. Where you need to have mutual respect for one another, have complementary skill sets, have really good communication with each the, enjoy spending a ridiculous amount of time for each other, with each other. And those are things I would say, for anyone thinking about getting married or thinking about starting a business with someone. And so it is kind of funny how they overlap.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:10]:

Yeah. As you reflect on the journey so far, curious from both your perspectives, but maybe starting with you, Michael, knowing that this is your third time going through this, what are the things that have surprised you a third time through this process?

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:46:27]:

So the one thing I'll say is definitely at this point, this is further sundays has gone further than either of my previous two ventures, right? So maybe in some of the earlier chapters I had an existing playbook, even though it was mostly of things not to do, but I had a play sheet, I had some lessons learned, but really in the past year or so, I think we've kind of surpassed what the scale that we reached it at kind of previous startups. And so I think the biggest lesson for me over the last year or so, especially as we start to scale the team, is that ultimately startups are just people, right? Like, I think we sort of have these abstractions that organizations have all these processes and all these different things. But at the end of the day, companies are just people, and they'll only go as far as their people. And how good are the people? How well lined are they? How clear is everyone on what the goals are? How well do people support each other? How well do people communicate with each other? I think that's been maybe the surprising thing of just how ultimately most of the problems, but also most of the solutions as you scale a company. Just lie in people, right. It's just about kind of everybody getting a little bit better every day. And then you kind of wake up one morning and you were able to kind of push the rock further up the hill together because you had so many great people all doing it in the same direction. And so I think that's probably the yeah. And if I had to add a second thing, it would also just be, frankly, like the role of luck in all of this. Too right. I think in order to build a really successful business, you need to work really hard. You need to be fortunate enough to be able to work alongside people smarter than you. Land more talented than you, and you have to make sacrifices. Land you have to put in the hours. But at the same time, I think you need some component of luck. Right. There's plenty of other businesses working just as hard as we are who, you know, haven't, you know, haven't been able to to be as successful. Land you know, I think just also kind of there's, you know, having done this a few times, I think there's a certain level of just gratitude and humility, of like, hey, sometimes you have to look, maybe that the meat company doesn't respond to my email. Land that would have been that. So you need a little luck.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:36]:

Too right. Sometimes you can't get meat at any price.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:49:42]:

By the way, the price was surprisingly affordable because it was so early on into COVID that they hadn't raised their prices yet. Right. So the funny thing is, it was basically a normal price. Fast forward that the next two years we saw there were times when the price of a given ingredient would go up 1000% between orders or something, and it's like, well, got to pay for it because dogs still got to eat. But that particular shipment of dry aged, pasture raised meat was weirdly affordable, as it turns out.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:23]:

Torya, as you reflect on the journey, how has it been for you transitioning from the veterinarian world to one of building a company?

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:50:31]:

Yeah, I mean, if you had told me ten or 15 years ago that I would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, running a dog food company, I would have thought you were crazy. But I guess I should have known when I was marrying Michael that I wasn't signing up for a normal life trajectory, but no, it's been really exciting. And honestly, just hearing one off sToryes from customers about the difference that Sundays makes in their own dog's life. As I said, I joke that I made Sundays for my own dog, but honestly, if Sundays makes a difference in one dog's life, that honestly just keeps me going, and it's just such a reason for being. We are that dog obsessive our lives, revolve around our dogs. And as a veterinarian, as a dog mom, it's truly who I am. And just hearing from our customers and their pets and their dogs is really kind of what makes it all worth it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:23]:

It's awesome. It's such a cool story land journey that you two have been on. As we work to bookend the conversation here, I think we have covered a lot of ground, but I'm curious if there are aspects of the journey, thinking back on it, thinking forward about the future, anything that we haven't touched on that you think is particularly important that you want to share.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:51:46]:

I think it's been a really fun journey so far. We're really grateful. We're just getting started. We're kind of not even 1% to where we want to be. And, yeah, I think the only other thing I'd maybe say this, and I don't know if this is, like, even an answer to this question at all, but I think something that I think Tory and I would both love to do is to actually get a little bit more involved in the Cleveland startup community. And just to flag that on this particular podcast. I grew up here, but between high school and moving back here, didn't really spend a lot of time in Cleveland. Did my first two startups in New York, Land, San Francisco, and so most of my kind of startup land founder networks are in those cities. And then during COVID when we were getting off the ground, obviously not a lot of socializing land networking, we were heads down building the business. We have a remote team land, so we're hiring the best talent from across the US. But as the business has gotten off the ground a little bit, and Tory and I and some of a couple other of our team members are in Cleveland, I think it would be fun to kind of get more involved in the community here. And maybe after the podcast, jeffrey would love some of your suggestions of folks to talk to or events to go to, because, yeah, Cleveland is such an amazing place. It's been a great place to grow up. It's a great place to raise our kids, both human and dog, and it's really been a great place to start a business and great infrastructure talent, really affordable, cost of living land. Maybe I'll just add this one more story is so we literally ended up raising our first investor money for Sundays as Tory and I were moving from New York City to Cleveland, and almost all of our initial angel investors were from New York. And so when we started the process, I was really shy and kind of sheepish about letting people know that we were planning to move in the next couple of weeks, but I felt it was the right thing to do to tell them. And so I would sort of kind of a modest, almost embarrassed way be like, hey, just FYI, even though we're meeting in New York, we're actually packing up a U Haul and about to drive with our dogs to Cleveland in like two weeks. And the funny lesson there was that and again, this is Pre COVID, but literally, with no exceptions, everybody was so supportive and loved it. They were like, oh, wait, so you're telling me if I invest a dollar, you're going to move to Cleveland, it's going to be worth $3 there versus New York, go to Cleveland. Why wait three weeks? Go today. I love that. And so just kind of a Cleveland relevant anecdote that I think that even investors in the coast land pre COVID and pre remote work who want to be close to their investments realize that especially in the early days where you only kind of have so much money to find product, market fit and figure it out. Being in a place where there's a more affordable cost of living and yet you have everything you need there including people to help make it happen, I think it's something you're going to see more and more kind of big world changing startups come out of Cleveland and cities in the US. Outside of SF in La, new York.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:48]:

And a little more space for the dogs.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:55:50]:

Well, that's the biggest thing there's. That thing that's going viral this week about the boss of the Utah software company who I don't know if you've seen this on Twitter, but he said that someone sold their family dog so that they could go work in person in the office. And it's like, I want to send a slack message to our team of, like, whatever the total opposite of that is, is what we are of. Like, buy an extra dog because you're working, you know, rescue an extra dog because you're working at home. And, you know, our whole reason for being is so you can spend more quality time with your dogs and your family. And so that's one of the reasons we're work from home, so that people can spend more time with their dogs. And as an aside, having also tried a dog friendly office can kind of be hard to get work done when you're in an office and there's ten dogs running around barking. So just to flag that, well, I.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:57]:

Would be more than happy to make some connections. I think there's a bunch of amazing folks in the area who would who would love to connect. So definitely we can follow up there. I mean, I just want to thank both of you, Tory, Michael, again for coming on. This was amazing. Really appreciate both of you taking the time to share your story and we're lucky to have you here in Cleveland.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:57:20]:

We love being here.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:57:21]:

Yeah, thanks for having us on. This has been great.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:24]:

If people had anything that they wanted to follow up with you about, where would be the best place for them to do so.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:57:32]:

Yeah, just shoot us an email. Michael@sundaysfordogs.com or Tory Tory@sundaysfordogs.com, although other spellings will also eventually make it to her. And, yeah, I encourage you to shoot us a note, especially if you have questions or feedback about the product. Again, at the end of the day, we're just trying to serve our customers and learn from the and so don't hesitate to reach out with questions or comments, big or small.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:05]:

Awesome. Oh, my goodness. I just realized 100 episodes into this, I've never missed the traditional closing question, which I almost just did, which is somewhat unrelated, but tied to Cleveland and is for a hidden gem, for something that other people should know about the area that maybe they don't.

Tory Waxman (Sundays) [00:58:23]:

As someone who's not from Cleveland, something that I didn't know about before I moved here, was just how incredible the Metro park system is. I feel like people don't realize that there's basically many national parks all over our city, and we actually made it a goal last summer to visit a different Metro park every weekend, which brought us to places around Cleveland that we would have never expected. So, honestly, I think that's just a favorite hidden gem that's kind of in front of all of us and around all of us that we should all appreciate more and get outside with your dog.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:54]:

Yeah, I share that sentiment very much. Well, thank you both again. I really appreciate it. This was great.

Michael Waxman (Sundays) [00:59:01]:

Yeah, likewise.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:04]:

That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at layoftheland.FM or find us on Twitter at pod layoftheland or at stern. J-E-F-E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.