Darryl Michaelson owns the purrfect store for any cat parents : Purrniture. We interviewed him to discover all of his secrets for a profitable business!

If you can’t listen.. Here is the recap!

Darryl Michaelson, the owner and founder of Purrniture Cat furniture, a small business based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, started his business in his garage.

Darryl: It actually started in my basement of a house that I was renting when I was 23 years old, and it began when I had adopted a couple of kittens, and I was in the market for some cat furniture. And I realized that there’s really not a whole lot of well-made, reasonably priced cat furniture and being handy. I figured I’d make my own, but my approach was to go out on a Saturday morning and scrounge up the wood, as opposed to drawing out some kind of blueprint and buying the lumber. So I drove around behind warehouse buildings and collected a pile of lumber. Spent all day Saturday creating the framework. And the framework I thought in my mind, should just have steps so levels where they could lay down and get up and down easier, and then tall scratching areas so that they could stretch when they want to do their scratching. So the whole weekend project of building it all day Saturday and then upholster it on Sunday, and on Sunday, I actually upholstered it in my living room. And that’s where I realized that the skill set needed for cat furniture is really in the upholstery. It has to have a seamless appearance in the end. And I stood there scratching my head with this big single piece of carpet, wondering, how am I going to get it to configure around all of these posts and these all these platforms and whatnot. So it was a learning experience from minute one, really.

Mary: Darryl, you hired Whisker Media, I believe, back in 2018. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were going through and what some of your marketing and PR challenges were?

Darryl: I actually built my very first cat furniture in 1990, doing it for a year as a hobby. I launched the business in 1991, and it took a few years for it to get a life of its own, but in the mid teens of, you know, 2010 through basically 2018, I realized that I had hit a plateau that I just couldn’t get over. And I thought to myself, I’ve tried things like having brochures in vet clinics, working with apartment buildings to see if I could put brochures in their lobby. But I thought, I need a professional, and it’s now time to invest in people who know more about that area. So that’s when Mary came along.

Mary: So basically I just went to his store because I loved it. And I said, hey, I’m a PR person. This was boots on the ground. This was like back in 2018, 2019. And I said, you know what? I think I can really, really help you. And at the time, Daryl, you were actually kind of cynical of agencies and that sort of thing. Can you tell us what happened with your the original marketing agency that you hired?

Darryl: Yeah. Uh, well, first of all, one of the things I knew I needed was a good website, but I didn’t really appreciate how much a website that’s good cost. So I would like ask my son, who was pretty good on the computer, to build it. And of course, children of a shoemaker go shoeless. So it really wasn’t coming along. And, you know, I was basically just spinning my wheels and again thinking, I need to get into basically invest in, in the marketing and, and PR I contracted. Well, they weren’t a couple, but they were a team partners to a man and a woman, and they were going to build the website and they were going to do the marketing, and they’re going to charge me $1,000 a month. And it just was a disaster, because the one website I was working with was it was entertaining, but it was not commerce friendly. And they destroyed that website in the attempt to make a better website. And it just dragged on for months. And then I got to a point where I realized these guys really aren’t going to deliver. And honoring my word, I signed a year contract with them, but after about the eighth month, I knew that this wasn’t going to go anywhere. And that’s when Mary contacted me and I had let her know that I’m still stuck in a contract situation. But as soon as this is over, we’ll talk. And, uh, everything changed as soon as we started talking with her.

Mary: Darryl, you spent $12,000. And you got nothing for your business. So this talks about when you do hire contractors, the importance of vetting them.

Alex: What made you trust Mary? What in her approach made you believe that she might do a better job than that team? You must have been very scared of starting with someone else after that experience.

Darryl: Oh, that’s a great question. Because of that experience, when Mary came to my store. She came with a friend of hers, and I immediately saw them as another team, and I was more skeptical. I asked tougher questions, and even Mary got the impression that I was resistant to moving forward with her. But it wasn’t that at all. I asked her, after I invest thousands of dollars to do my website, what are you going to do? And then she laid out, well, once the website is done, we’ll get you going on Google. We’ll get you going on some podcasts. We’ll do the stuff that should have been going on for years now, because at that point in the game, I’ve been in business over 25 years and I was doing okay, but I knew that there was a new level that I could achieve. It’s just, how do I get there from here? So I was much more tough on Mary with the questions.

Alex: But do you feel like with the media and Mary in general helped you reach the target audience you really wanted to reach?

Darryl: Yes. It took about three months to rebuild the website, and as soon as it was up and running, I was getting orders from like the first hour. And, she had put me on a couple of podcasts from there, and then we worked on a good Google ad campaign. She got me some television. I’ve been on television a bunch of times, but this was more of a constructed interview as opposed to just out of the blue. So yeah, it’s really my sales increased by about 40% once everything was in place, and I’m now at the point of where I want it to be. From the days I was dreaming of what the potential for this could be, and it’s just been riding really nice for about four years, five years now.

Alex: Mary always tells me, you’ve got to turn lemons into lemonade. And I know that she does this a lot with Purrniture. So my question is, I think something quite bad happened to furniture a couple of months ago, but I think Mary and Whisker Media in general, we managed to turn it to something a little bit better.

Darryl: Actually, there’s two situations. A couple of years back, I think it was 20, 22, I had a trailer parked behind my building. It was completely full of logos, all four sides. And it ended up getting stolen. And I thought to myself, well, you know, what can you do? Hopefully I’ll spot it, but it’s just I lost it and I was talking to Mary about it, and she said that would be a news story. And I thought, why would the news care about a company losing its trailer? But she reached out to all the local stations, and there’s four stations in our area here, and three of them did stories on the trailer, and one of the three actually did a ten minute feature story on the business. And in that story, somebody suggested that I start a GoFundMe page for the trailer, which ended up bringing in all the money that I had spent to buy the trailer in the first place. So talk about making lemonades out of lemon. The second one was just a couple of months back. Overnight, somebody had thrown a pretty good sized rock, about a three inch diameter rock through one of the store windows. And again, I was just telling Mary that I have a broken window. And again, she says, well, that’s a news story. And I thought a news story about a rock being thrown through a window is just baffling to me. But. Sure enough, she sent out the emails and two of the stations came by and did a story on it.

Mary: This is a technique called news jacking, and any business or nonprofit can use it. I use it all the time. I used it on Darryl. In Darryl’s case, Darryl was the news, Darryl had news. And when the media is covering stories, they love crime. Anything bad, anything terrible gets eyeballs. You know, just the fact that he has a cat furniture store is not a news story. So news jacking is inserting yourself into the story. And another example would be when all the hurricanes are happening down south, an animal rescue or animal welfare group could insert themselves, especially if they are taking animals in from the South, because that’s a connection to the national story. Another thing this may not be animal related, but to give you an example is when there is, you know, the Ukraine war is going on with Russia. Here in Minnesota, there are volunteers going through the Red cross or wherever, help wanting to help the people displaced by the war. That’s a news story. That’s called news jacking and I encourage everyone to use it. Anyone can use it, even, you know, pet product companies. I’m going to say, of course, the 4th of July, if you have a CBD product, if you have a Thunder shirt or anything, a calming, that’s another way to insert yourself into the story. Call up your local media and say I can give you tips on animal anxiety and that sort of thing, and combine that with like a digital presence and your goals and a media hit is thousands and thousands of viewers and listeners.

Alex: Working so closely with Darryl is really nice because, you know, as a really small business, we can see which strategy works and which one doesn’t work as well. Because we see a direct result. We can say okay this is working. This is not working as well. He is always sending us emails if he gets the Google Analytics reports and not enough eyeballs have clicked or seen like we hear about it. And that’s very helpful because then we know, okay, we need to change that. You know, I like to think that when we work with our clients, it is more of a partnership. We all want to be successful together. So if there’s really open communication and they really tell us well oh look at that. That got resolved. And we can work closer together to make this campaign or this, you know, a couple of months of working together, a big success because at the end of it, that’s what we all want. And so the key takeaways for this episode, for the people listening at home, vet your marketing and PR people, you know, ask the tough questions asked for for specific goals to work towards.

Alex: And I have one last question for you, Darryl, For all of the people listening to us, you know, there might be a couple that have, like a really good idea of a business, especially pet businesses, but they just don’t know how to start where to start. So what would be your tip for those like entrepreneurs? What would be something you would tell them?

Darryl: Well, I think the main thing is to not overspend, thinking that you’re going to get results. So when I first started this, I was doing every little street fair, pet fair, cat show, anything that got. And then it took me about five years of being in business before I could afford to have a brochure, and I bought a big truck. So it’s really about delayed gratification and setting small goals. And really the grassroots of how do you get people to see your product without you having to overspend on it? Because frankly, money isn’t the answer. It’s really about time. You have to allow it. Time.