639: She Built A 6-Figure Cat Toy Business Because Someone Annoyed Her On IG With Dawn LaFontaine

Podcast: Download (Duration: 46:05 — 53.0MB)

The wholesale outreach strategy that closes at 50%, in one sentence: send a free physical product sample to a targeted independent retailer, then follow up every two weeks by phone and email using a CRM until they either place an order or ask you to stop. That is the exact playbook Dawn LaFontaine of Cat in the Box uses to close half of every prospect she samples, and she shared the full breakdown on this episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast.

Dawn is a former stay-at-home mom who could not get hired anywhere after 27 years out of the workforce, so she bootstrapped a pet product company that is now sold in over 100 independent stores across the US and Europe. Along the way she also flipped her whole product line, from cardboard cat houses that got press but lost money on shipping to a range of wool cat toys handmade by a Fair Trade craft guild in Nepal.

Below is the full playbook: how she noticed the accidental Instagram signal that led to her hit product, why she pivoted away from her original press-magnet product, how she sourced ethical wool toys from Nepal, and her exact repeatable wholesale outreach process that batting-averages a 50% close rate without a single ad.

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Key takeaways

• Wholesale outreach closes at 50% when you send a real product sample, then follow up every 2 weeks by phone and email until the retailer buys or tells you to stop. Persistence, not pitching, is the whole game.
• Use a CRM (Dawn uses HubSpot) to schedule the every-two-weeks follow-ups. A spreadsheet does not work; you will forget.
• Send the sample with a short paper letter that mentions the store employee you spoke to by name, includes the MSRP, the wholesale price, and a QR code to your Faire page.
• Pivot away from a product when it feels like pushing a boulder uphill: hard to sell direct, hard to place in stores, hard to ship profitably. Everything you learned still transfers to the next product.
• The best product-selection filter is still “fits in a shoe box.” Small, light, and unbreakable makes every downstream margin (shipping, packaging, storage) work.
• Retailer-buyer leads live in your industry’s independent trade magazine. Mine the “letters to the editor” and vendor call-outs for stores worth pitching.
• Nepal is a serious wool sourcing option. Higher unit cost than China, Fair Trade certified, azo-free dyes, and small minimum order quantities make it viable for niche pet and gift brands.

The wholesale outreach strategy that closes at 50%

Dawn’s wholesale outreach strategy closes at 50% because it is built on a physical sample plus disciplined every-two-weeks follow-up, not on ads or cold pitches. Half of every independent retailer she sends a sample to eventually places a wholesale order, and once they buy, they buy again with almost no additional selling.

She calls this her “batting 500” rate. Out of every 100 stores she samples, roughly 50 become paying wholesale customers, most of them recurring.

The rest of this post walks through the exact steps she uses, plus the product and sourcing decisions that made the strategy work in the first place.

Step 1: Build a targeted list of independent retailers worth pitching

Build your prospect list from your industry’s independent trade magazine, not from generic Google searches or business directories. The pet industry has a specialized magazine that surfaces the most cutting-edge independent pet stores in the country, the ones actually competing against Chewy and Amazon on differentiated selection instead of price.

Dawn’s list-building routine is boring on purpose. Every time a new issue arrives, she reads through it and writes down the name of every independent retailer that appears in letters to the editor, vendor spotlights, or store profiles. Those are the shops actively hunting for unique product.

That running list is her outbound pipeline. She works from the top down whenever she has time to make calls.

Step 2: Make the first call and offer a free product sample

Call the store, ask for the buyer by name, and offer to send a free physical sample of your product. Do not pitch on this call. The goal is a single yes: permission to send the sample.

Here is roughly what Dawn says when the clerk picks up.

“Hi, is [Buyer’s name] in? I’m Dawn LaFontaine from Cat in the Box, and I have a product sample I’d love to send to [Buyer]. Would she be interested in receiving a free sample?”

If the buyer is out, the clerk tells her whether email or a mailed sample is preferred. Either way, she gets both the buyer’s name and permission for the first touch. Roughly 25% of the time the buyer is actually on the phone, which turns into a real conversation.

Step 3: Send the sample with a physical letter, MSRP, and a QR code to Faire

Ship the sample inside a small package with a short printed letter, the MSRP, the wholesale price, and a QR code that points directly to your Faire page so the retailer can place a first order in one scan. The letter is on letterhead, three short paragraphs long, and mentions the store employee she spoke to by name.

The opening line does a lot of work. Something like: “I spoke to Chris in the store today and she said you wouldn’t mind receiving a product sample.”

That single sentence proves she actually called the store, took a real interest in the business, and did the human work before shipping the box. In an era of automated LinkedIn spam, a physical letter that references a real conversation with a real employee is a differentiator.

The Faire QR code is deliberate. Sending the buyer to Faire means you pay 0% commission on any order from a customer you referred yourself, since Faire only takes commission on the leads it generated. That is a meaningful margin difference at scale.

Step 4: Follow up every 2 weeks using HubSpot until they buy or say stop

Schedule a follow-up in HubSpot (or any CRM) for exactly 2 weeks after the sample ships, and repeat every 2 weeks with alternating calls and emails until the buyer either places an order or asks you to stop. A spreadsheet does not work here; you will forget who is due, and the whole system collapses.

Dawn had one prospect who took a full year of polite every-two-weeks follow-up before placing the first order. That one customer now buys from her forever, on autopilot.

Rotate the follow-up angle so you never sound like a recording.

• Call one: “Just circling back to make sure the sample arrived.”
• Email two weeks later: “Did any of the store cats get a chance to play with it? Any feedback?”
• Call two weeks after that: “Any questions on pricing or shipping?”
• Email two weeks after that: “Happy to send another sample if the first got lost in the shuffle.”

The message is polite persistence, not pressure. As long as the retailer has not said “please stop,” they are still in the pipeline.

Why the wholesale channel outperforms Amazon and paid ads for niche brands

Wholesale outperforms Amazon and paid ads for a lot of niche brands because wholesale buyers are almost zero-maintenance once acquired: they reorder on their own, they pay shipping, they do not return product, and they do not demand coupons. Wedding and event planners on Dawn’s list keep reordering without ever asking for a discount because they simply need the product for the next event.

Cat in the Box’s revenue now splits roughly a third own website, a third Amazon, and a third wholesale. Dawn wants wholesale to keep growing because it is the most profitable and least stressful of the three channels.

The trade-off is that wholesale is founder-led work. Dawn is a self-described “raging introvert” who avoided cold-calling for years, tried postcards and email-only outreach and rewrites of both, and none of it worked. The only thing that finally moved orders was the phone plus the physical sample plus the CRM-driven follow-up.

How one Instagram unfollow led to a 6-figure wool cat toy line

Dawn’s best-selling product line came from noticing who unfollowed her on Instagram, clicking through, and discovering that the unfollower sold a wool cat toy. She had never considered wool as a category, ordered 200 units each of two designs she designed herself (a red wool mouse with a 6-foot tail and a rainbow-tailed mouse), and sold out of all 400 units almost immediately.

The design and selling process worked in three moves.

She sourced from a Fair Trade craft guild in Nepal instead of China. The wool comes from New Zealand, the felt artisans are low-income women who get a living wage, health and retirement benefits, and incentives for keeping their daughters in school.

The dyes are also azo-free, which mattered to her because cats chew the toys. China quotes she got refused to confirm the dye chemistry, so she walked.

She designed the products herself over video. Finding the factories took heavy digging (a travel-guide article about ethical Nepal manufacturers was the entry point), then multiple rounds of $3 mailed samples until the octopus, mouse, and other designs looked right. One design took about a year of back and forth.

She launched with 200 units per design, listed on her website, emailed her list of ~5,500 subscribers, and offered the same product wholesale on Faire. The influencer moment came later: a TikTok creator with 11 million followers posted about the wool mouse organically, and inventory sold out across every channel.

How to know when to pivot your product

Pivot away from a product when direct sales feel like pushing a boulder uphill, retailers will not stock it, and the shipping economics do not work no matter how you redesign. Everything you learned building the first product still transfers to the next one, so a pivot is not lost effort.

Dawn’s original product was a line of designer cardboard cat houses that got her featured in Parade, NBC News, The Boston Globe, and US News and World Report. Press did not translate to profit. Three problems compounded.

Shipping ate the margin. The compact designs still cost around $12 to ship, and the larger, assembled designs could cost $30 to $40 to ship to California. She had to keep raising prices to cover free shipping, which suppressed conversion.

Independent pet stores would not stock them. Even her most compact cardboard design took up too much shelf space for small store footprints, and the margin was too thin for the retailer.

Minimum order quantities were brutal. Even for a seasonal SKU like her haunted-house cat design, she had to order 1,500 units at a time, then store and re-order them for the following year.

The signals to watch for are consistent across categories: hard to sell direct, hard to place wholesale, and unit economics that only work at volumes you cannot hit yet. Fix what you can, and if the boulder is still uphill, try something else.

The best product-selection filter: “fits in a shoe box”

The single best product-selection filter for a new ecommerce business is whether the product fits in a shoe box, because small and light drives every downstream margin: cheaper shipping, cheaper packaging, cheaper storage, and lower minimum-order quantities. Dawn credits ignoring that filter with the two years she spent trying to make cardboard cat houses profitable.

Wool cat toys pass the shoe-box test on every dimension. They cost around $5-$6 to produce, they are cheap to store, cheap to package, cheap to ship, they retail for $17-$25, and buyers reorder them for multiple cats or as gifts.

If you are still in the product-selection phase, run every candidate through the shoe-box test before you order the first sample.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get wholesale orders for my product without ads?

Build a targeted list of independent retailers from your industry’s trade magazine, call each store and offer to send a free physical product sample, then follow up every 2 weeks by alternating phone and email until they buy or ask you to stop. Dawn LaFontaine of Cat in the Box closes about 50% of the retailers she samples using exactly this loop.

How often should I follow up with wholesale prospects?

Every 2 weeks, using a CRM to schedule the reminders, until the retailer places an order or explicitly asks you to stop. Some buyers take a year of polite every-two-weeks follow-up before the first order, and once they buy they typically become recurring customers with almost no additional selling.

What is the best CRM for tracking wholesale outreach as a small brand?

Any CRM that lets you set a recurring follow-up reminder will beat a spreadsheet. Dawn uses HubSpot’s free tier for her wholesale outreach because the reminders never let a prospect slip out of the pipeline, and spreadsheets she had used before consistently failed her.

Should I use Faire for wholesale ecommerce?

Yes, but drive your own retailers to Faire rather than waiting for Faire to find them for you. When you refer a retailer yourself, you pay 0% commission on their orders, which meaningfully protects margin at scale. Faire’s built-in discovery is getting more crowded, so treat it as your checkout and re-order infrastructure, not your lead source.

What should I include in a wholesale sample package?

Include the product sample, a short printed letter on letterhead (2-3 paragraphs, referencing the employee you spoke to by name), the MSRP, the wholesale price, and a QR code to your Faire page so the retailer can place a first order in one scan. Small, personal, and easy to act on beats a generic catalog every time.

Is it cheaper to manufacture wool products in Nepal or China?

Nepal is typically more expensive per unit than China, but the trade-offs (Fair Trade certification, azo-free dyes, small minimum order quantities, and full transparency on materials and labor) can be worth the premium for niche pet, gift, and lifestyle brands. Dawn walked away from China because she could not get clear answers on which dyes were used on toys her customers’ cats would chew.

When should I pivot my ecommerce product?

Pivot when direct-to-consumer sales feel like pushing a boulder uphill, retailers will not stock the product, and the shipping economics do not improve after multiple redesigns. Everything you learned on the first product (sourcing, packaging, retailer relationships, ad testing) transfers to the next one, so pivoting is compounding effort, not wasted effort.

What product criteria should I use when starting an ecommerce business?

Start with the “fits in a shoe box” filter: small, light, and unbreakable makes shipping, packaging, storage, and minimum-order economics all work in your favor. Dawn’s cardboard cat houses failed the test and lost money on shipping; her wool cat toys pass on every dimension and now drive the majority of her growth.

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