(Done in the voice of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc. If you don’t “get it”, don’t worry… it’s because I’m a bit of a geek.)

Thank you all for visiting. We’ve got some exciting things to share with you today and we just know you’re going to love them as much as we do.

First off our custom photo treat packaging has a been a huge success. Orders are up over 100% over this time last year. We’re going to continue to offer our great, fresh baked pet treats in our online store. You can order custom photos on our large model (1lb) and nano (1/2lb) treat bags. We’ve also added the ability to get kitty treats with custom photos. All of these options are available right now and shipping today on BakersDog.com.

The market for humiliating pets with silly costumes and accesories continues to grow. We’ve taken the same hilarious hats and wacky collars we sold during the holidays and drastically reduced the prices. Today we’re offering goofy santa hats for just $1.99. They’re available right now at BakersDog.com.

Our latest product, the Nom-Nom Sandwich is one of our most popular treats. Our engineers spent countless hours figuring out a way of making a wheat and corn free treat that would meet our standards for quality and simple design. We’re very proud of that process and I’m going to ask Paul Reynolds, our Lead Treat Designer, to come on the stage and tell you a little bit more about it….

(Playing: way too long and boring video about the Nom-Nom Sandwich)

Thanks for that, Paul. We have Nom-Nom Sandwiches can be ordered right now and shipped today. Just visit our online store for more information. And now my good friend, Rick Astley, is going to to tell us a little bit about how much his dog enjoys Baker’s Dog treats and maybe we can get him to sing us a tune…

(Never gonna give up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and…)

…Thank you, Rick. Well folks, thank you so much for you and your dogs continued support. 2008 was a great year for us and we expect 2009 to be even better. We’ve got lots of exciting new products and website improvements planned. Oh, there is one more thing…

PEANUT BUTTER CUPS

On sale TODAY and shipping TODAY

Lucy is sacked out!

The Baker’s Dog is proudly sponsoring The Daily Puppy’s January Photo Contest! The winner that posts the best “Sleepy Time” photo will win a bunch of treats from us including biscuit bags with the winning photo on them! Plus, the winning photo will be available to the winning pup’s owner so they can re-order more and share it with friends at no extra charge.

Pick one of the bajillion pictures you have of your little guy and enter the contest. What have you got to to lose?

Fresh labels for some fresh treats. Ready to ship!

Need a last minute holiday gift for a dog lover? We suggest checking out our custom photo treats!

When you give the gift of a custom photo treat you’re giving them fresh baked wholesome treats for their beloved dog, a unique package for them, AND the $4.99 photo upload fee is already paid by you so they can re-order more treats with their dog’s photo at no extra charge. Best of all? It’s cheap (you can get a $5.99 half pound of treats or $9.99 full pound, plus the $4.99 fee) and we’ll process your order within 24 hours of receiving your order. If you place your order by 2pm EST on Friday, December 19th and select rush shipping, we can get it to you by December 24th!

We’ve made it extremely simple to upload a photo and enter the information. We even show you a real-time preview of exactly what the label will look like before you place your order. We will save the photo to your account so you can re-order without it costing any more than our non-custom packaged treats. You share any of your photos to other people so they can use it as if they had uploaded it themselves. We can ship directly to any address in the domestic U.S. that you specify and, if you mark it as a gift order, the packing slip won’t have any pricing information on it.

What are you waiting for?

Before we get into the photos, I want to to make a quick note of how proud I am of this store. The construction process has taken way longer than we wanted. But the overall experience has been a joy. My creative, technical, and DIY tendencies have been fully stimulated without restriction. There are very few things in the store that we didn’t make or modify ourselves. The only work we hired out was the counter tops by Creative Marble. What you see in these pictures are the pure effort and ideas from Tracy and myself with the support of our awesome friends and family. With the acceptance speech out of the way, on with the show…

I was excited we had finally gotten to the point of being able to open. But I had to get up pretty early to finish designing and printing some signs (told ya- we do it all!). The light coming into the store in the mornings is beautiful and I started snapping photos…

Look at that light! Hey. I bet the bakery case would look really sweet right now…

Oh yes. That gorgeous warm sunlight feels great on my back. Let’s get a little closer…

Something smells like delicious carob and yogurt. But I’m on the front side of the case… How could that be… OH MY GOSH! THE TREATS ARE MELTING! DO SOMETHING!

Um… yeah. Oops. I turned off the heat and opened the back door of the store. I held off on taking pictures for a little while after that! This last series is taken from the front door of the store, a sweeping pan from right to left, and then a little walk around closer from left to right. Enjoy

This is Maya from Mexico. Her nose doesn't really glow red. Sorry.

We’re very tired, so I’ll keep this short. We will be open for business tomorrow, December 8th! We’ve got all kinds of goodies and toys on display. We’ve still got a ways to go…a real grand opening probably won’t happen for several weeks. Please do stop by to check things out and say hello. I’ll be the tall gentleman with bags under his eyes making signs and reading the manual to the credit card machine.

Sorry for the crappy cell phone pic. Click for a larger, even more blurry version.

A little more progress with the bakery this week. We have most of the retail shelving built, the bakery case is getting a fresh coat of paint, and our shiny new double stack oven was delivered! (Nope, still no water/toilet… sigh). But I’ve been up late the past few nights working on getting our photo label pipeline up and running. You, see, the Mr. Stanley Pinkerton has invited us to his house tonight and his owner sent this photo as a part of the invitation:

There's no arguing Mr. Pinkerton's photogenic qualities.

I saw this as a great oppotunity to get going on how our automagic label system is going to actually work out. The resulting bags you see above still aren’t quite the final design, but it’s darn close. The neat thing is they were generated from a database that stuck the photo, dog’s information, and flavor information on to the label template design. So when you upload your photo through our store website (coming soon!), you pay a single, one time fee and it will be saved forever. When you order treats with that photo on it, it will get stuck in this fancy pants database thingy I’m talking about and the label will get generated when we process your order. That’s why we are able to offer photo treat labels with super fast turnaround and no extra charge. Pretty snazzy huh?

View from the production area. Click to enlarge

I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday scraping the floors and spreading leveling compound in preparation of laying the new floors down.  Despite how dirty and tired we were, we got excited on Friday afternoon and started putting the floor down. We stopped about 1/3rd of the way through. Tracy is a college football fanatic, so we took Saturday off to rest our bones and cheer on the Nebraska Cornhuskers (They won… GO BIG RED!).

Can you believe this isn't real wood? Click to enlarge

We got a lazy late start Sunday but powered through to get all of the flooring down. It was really important that we finished since we’ll be receiving delivery of several shelving units on Monday! We should start getting some equipment in this week as well. Heck, we may even have running water some time soon. The big empty check boxes that scare me from a scheduling standpoint will be electrical wiring and building out the counter space. We’re on track for a mid-November opening, so stay tuned!

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

This is the front of a promotional postcard that we're distributing locally.

The catalyst that really got us excited about The Baker’s Dog plan was the custom photo package treats. We know so many dog lovers that have great pictures of their dogs. One of the first things I did was design the label. The base label is a simple black and white design that really let’s the photos stand out. You will also see this design concept carried through to the website, promotional materials and the retail store interior design.

Click for a larger version.

The original idea was to have monthly photo contests and choose a new picture per flavor for that month. But after some quick thought, we realized we should let our customers upload pictures online and order treats with their pups picture on them whenever they like. We bag the treats fresh when you order them anyway, so it really wasn’t that big of a leap. We still need photos for our packages that we sell in the retail store. We’ll pick those from the uploaded pictures if you give us permission to do so. If we pick your photo, we’ll send you some free treats!

The printing method we use is identical to our retail store packages. Since it’s an integral part of our process, we can offer this personalized service with no expensive minimum order requirements or long turn around times. The labels are printed on demand by a high quality, full color Roland printer to a nice glossy white sticker using environmentally friendly inks. The printer also cuts the label out and it is hand applied to each recycled paper bag before we fill it with delicious, fresh baked treats!

We want to photo upload process to be easy. So we are still developing the store part of the website to make it as simple as possible for our customers to upload and manage their photos. Stay tuned!