The entire Baker’s Dog crew, including Josie,  is taking a little time off starting May 12th. Any orders placed between the 12th and 19th won’t be shipped until the 2oth. Check out the discounted toys we added to the store! If you’d like to follow us on our great adventure to Nebraska, you can travel with us virtually on Twitter.

We had a little issue. Sorry about that!

We changed our email list software and sign up form last week. As a result, it caused a bug which affected photo uploads. If you experienced trouble uploading a photo in the past week, we have resolved the issue. If you experience any difficulty or issues on our website, please let us know!

Due to overwhelming demand, we have added Soft, Crunchy, and Assorted Mix options to the One Pounder and Half Pounder flavor choices! Of course, these bags can be customized with your dog’s photo just like our single flavor bags.

We have also been busy adding a great selection of toys (including kitty stuff!) to our online store. We have been working on some new recipes in the kitchen too! As always, we pride ourselves in super fast shipping via USPS Priority Mail to anywhere in the U.S.

Josie and I decided to check out the new Barc Parc that opened this week. Lots of folks have been making the drive down to the original Barc Parc at Market Common since it opened a couple years ago. But not everyone is crazy about the drive in Summer traffic and we’ve been sorely needing something on the North end for quite some time. The 62nd Ave Barc Parc is right beside the snazzy new YMCA (that also opened this week). The park is divided into a small and big dog section. We only had time to explore the small dog side of the park today. But Josie really wanted to play with the big doggies! From what I could tell, this park does not have a water feature like the Market Common Barc Parc has. There was probably around 50 people there at 11am today.

The best part? It’s only a couple minutes from us! I snapped some photos so you can see what it’s all about (click images for larger versions)…

The Barc Parc in the corner of the YMCA Parking Lot

The entrance to the park has a staging area before you go into the big or small dog sections.

The big dog area also has a second entrance/exit

You have to be below a certain height to enter the small dog area. Small dogs can go into the big dog area!

Just after entering the small dog area, you can walk down the sidewalk towards the wooded area.

Whoa! Easy now party animals. Check out the doggie water fountain!

This view is from the back of the small dog area. There are benches, litter bags and trash cans everywhere.

The wooded area is on the small dog side of the park.

The big dogs and small dogs can still socialize in the shade!

Look how close it is to The Baker's Dog!

Our “Vick” on a Stick got a mention on the local FOX affiliate:

It’s about time the local media started paying some attention to us!

Josie is ready for football! Go Cornhuskers!

We’ve had a great first Summer and we’re just really in awe of everyone’s positive comments and support. Now that school is back in session, it’s time for us to get cracking on all those “round tuits” we’ve been talking about. To start, we’ve got several new things going on:

• New business hours. For now, it’s 12pm-7pm during the week and 10am-6pm on Saturdays. That’s seriously cramping our college football lifestyle, so those hours are subject to change.

• New products. We’ve added new items to our online and retail store. We’re also planning on reworking some of our recipes in the coming weeks.

• New promotions. We’re sponsoring several events and contests. Check out the online photo contest at CarolinaLive.com and we’ll also have some items at the Beach Bound Hounds event this month!

• New labels. We’re ready to rotate out our current photos for more Fall and Winter themed shots. Be sure to check the box to allow us to use your custom photo labels.

• New site features. I’ve been wanting to do more of these. But to start, we’ve added the ability to easily re-order items you have ordered in the past:

There’s lot of other exciting product ideas and partnerships we have in development. So be sure to subscribe to our email list or become our Facebook fan to stay on top of the latest news.

This is @trinalina's puppy!

Most business like ours don’t have to deal with such a seasonal surge of visitors like we have here in Myrtle Beach. We knew that our “Winter” hours of 10am-7pm were OK for local folks stopping by on their lunch break and after work. But it was also the exact times that tourists are doing fun things like laying on the beach and eating dinner. As such, we decided to change our hours this week: Monday-Friday we’ll be open 12pm to 9pm and on the weekends we’ll open at 10am and close around 2pm. It was surprising to me that Saturdays are incredibly slow. But if things are hoppin’, we’ll stay open later. So far, it looks like the new hours are working out great! If we can afford to hire more staff, we’ll be able to expand our hours to accommodate everyone’s needs.

Now on to the other stuff…

Email subscribers: Could you do us a favor? If you subscribed any time before June 2009, please unsubscribe and then  re-subscribe at the bottom of the main page. I know it seems weird, but it’s a technical issue beyond our control.

Podcast subscribers: There’s a new feed URL you need to subscribe to: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheBakersDogPodcast. I haven’t been able to get the iTunes Store link to update to the new feed yet.

Finally, I was on Twitter and asked for some photos to put in this post. You can click each photo to go to their Twitter profile:

@johnattebury

@digimom1

@pupcakespetbout is a wholesale customer of ours in Columbia, SC!

@vegasrockdog

@agilespots

@jadeheart

@mssophiebelle

If you’re on Twitter, follow these guys!

We tried telling you how social we were before. Well, I guess we’ve been so social that we were chosen to be interviewed as a part of an article in the Weekly Surge about Grand Strand folks on Twitter!

I’m really pleased with the article. It was incredibly well covered and my friend Roger Yale really sifted through my ramblings and got exactly what I was trying to say distilled down to some complete and coherent sentences. Give it a read!

Today, Josie had her first real grooming since we’ve gotten her.  Until Josie learns to run the register and print custom photo labels, I’m pretty much stuck at the store. I decided to give mobile groomer, Snips a try. I knew Jennifer and Bill had run a pet retail store that specialized in holistic foods before they decided to focus solely on grooming. So I knew they were experienced and really cared about the dogs. But I hadn’t heard anything about their grooming service.

I sent them an email to set up an appointment. In the Myrtle Beach area, it’s rare to find businesses willing to respond and work with you over email. So I was pleased when I got a response not too long after sending it. We set up an appointment and they actually arrived at the store early, another rarity when dealing with appointment based services!

Their mobile grooming salon is fully self contained and Josie was transformed in just under 45 minutes. Considering they are a full service mobile groomer (wash, clip, nail trim, ear hair, fluff dry, etc), the pricing was very reasonable. I think most dogs will be right around the $40 range. If you schedule your next appointment with them on the day of the grooming, it automatically enrolls you into their Club Snips loyalty program which will bring the price down even more across multiple visits.

So if you’re a local looking for a groomer or you’re on vacation with your doggy in the Myrtle Beach area, give them a try!

Our local minor league baseball team, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, will be having a “Bark In The Park” night on May 15th and we’ll be there! We have a limited number of free tickets to give away, just stop by the store and ask if we have any left.

Josie being disgustingly cute... as usual.

I’ve had a list of things I’ve been wanting to do with BakersDog.com for some time. With the post-Easter rush behind us, I’ve managed to tackle quite a few of them:

$1.99 Photo Uploads! In case you haven’t seen or heard about our custom photo packaging, we’ll print whatever photo you upload on our treat bags. Until now, there was only a $4.99 upload fee that covered the cost of processing the photo and saving it to your account. Once saved, you can re-order treats with that photo, share or transfer the photo to others (at no additional cost). For those not interested in saving the photo for future re-orders or sharing, there’s now a $1.99 “Lite” option.

Pet Photographer & Wholesale Program! We’ve started a program for Pet Photographers and other industry professionals (pet sitters, groomers, etc) that are interested in using our custom photo packaging for thank you gifts to clients and other promotions. If interested, please contact us for details. We also have the support in for wholesale customers, we just need to finalize the terms and pricing.

More Baker’s Dog Photos! I’ve been tweeting my tail off and people seem to enjoy my occasional photo tweets. So now you can see the latest ones on the main home page without enduring Twitter.com.

Cakes! We’ve been taking cake orders somewhat discretely for the past couple of months. We wanted to be sure we could provide the best possible product we could before really advertising. Now you can order them online (local customers only, sorry!)

Search! There’s a site search box on pretty much every page now. Now you can just search what you’re looking for instead of me figuring out a clever way to put everything on every page while keeping a clean and simple look.

Stuff You Won’t Notice! That’s right. I made a few small changes and fixes to make your online shopping experience so convenient and pleasant that you hopefully won’t notice at all. If anything doesn’t appear to be working properly, please please let us know.

Got suggestions or requests? We’d love to hear them!